A magazine of forecasts, trends, and ideas about the future
Forecasts for the Next 25 Years
THE FUTURIST, September-October 2002
Page 2.In the United States and other industrial democracies, the aristocracy of achievement is growing in size and pervasive in function. These people are usually leaders because they want to be-often assisted, selected, promoted, or adopted as proteges by earlier achievers. (None of us, of course, can lead in everything we touch; all of us are followers in most of our life and work.)
People may be leaders in public or private employ, but that distinction is increasingly indistinct in our mixed economy. They may be leaders in politics or business or agriculture or labor or law or education or scientific research or journalism or religion or community issues; some swing from branch to branch in the forest of occupations; some specialize in advocacy or lobbying on policy issues ranging from abortion rights to the municipal zoo. They may be in the establishment or in the antiestablishment. Their writ, conferred or chosen, may run to community affairs, to national decisions or global issues, to a whole multinational industry or to a narrower but deeper slice of life and work: a single firm, a local agency, a neighborhood.
I have tried several times to count the number of "leaders" in the United States. In the mid-1950s, because I was publisher of a magazine I wanted them to buy, I counted 555,000 "opinion leaders." A 1971 extrapolation of that figure came out at about a million. Seven out of 10 of these were executive leaders of many kinds of organizations; this "aristocracy of achievement" was estimated in 1985 at one out of every 200 Americans. After that I gave up: The knowledge revolution keeps multiplying the numbers of Americans who take the opportunity to lead, at one time or another, on one issue or another, in one community or another.
The galloping rate of growth of complexity means that a growth curve of the requirement for leaders (if anyone were clever enough to construct such an index) would show a steeper climb than any other growth rate in our political economy.
Attitudes of Leadership
Every person who seeks or assumes a leadership role in an information-rich society has to develop some of the aptitudes and attitudes of the generalist. Generalists have to be skeptical of inherited assumptions-because so many of them are being undermined so fast by the informatization of society.
Leaders have to be curious about science-based technology-because those who would control it must first understand, not how it works, but what it can do for us and to us. That's the way most of us understand an automobile: We can't fix it, but we're good at driving it. They have to be broad in their perspective-to take account of the disappearing distinctions between "public" and "private" and between "domestic" and "foreign." They have to be eager to pull people and ideas together-rather than split them apart-so they have to be really interested in issues of fairness. And they have to be self-confident enough to work, not out of sight in a back room, but riskily out on a limb in an increasingly open society.
Attitudes are the steepest part of the generalist's learning curve. Survival and growth in the get-it-all-- together profession, perhaps the world's most difficult line of work, requires a mind-set that is, by and large, neglected in our education.
I first tried to define this mind-set many years ago before a convention of city managers, because I thought they do some of the world's toughest and least-rewarded work. After that I kept trying out on executive audiences and student seminars a series of draft formulations until I thought I had it about right.
In 1982, a book called The One Minute Manager by Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson hit the best-seller lists. So I tried to compress in a similar compass, for an op-ed article titled "The One Minute Leader," the generalist mind-set I had been drafting and redrafting. My tongue was only half in cheek. There had to be a market niche for a learning tool that leaders, who are usually in a hurry, could absorb on the run.
Those of us who presume to take the lead in a democracy, where nobody is even supposed to be in charge, seem to need an arsenal of eight attitudes indispensable to the management of complexity:
1. A lively intellectual curiosity, an interest in everything-because everything really is related to everything else, and therefore to what you're trying to do, whatever it is.
2. A genuine interest in what other people think, and why they think that way-which means you have to be at peace with yourself for a start.
3. A feeling of special responsibility for envisioning a future that's different from a straight-line projection of the present. Trends are not destiny.
4. A hunch that most risks are there not to be avoided but to be taken.
5. A mind-set that crises are normal, tensions can be promising, and complexity is fun.
6. A realization that paranoia and self-pity are reserved for people who don't want to be leaders.
7. A sense of personal responsibility for the general outcome of your efforts.
8. A quality I call "unwarranted optimism"-the conviction that there must be some more-upbeat outcome than would result from adding up all the available expert advice.
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