The American Civil War – an education in leadership by Andre van Heerden

2011 marks the 150^th anniversary of the outbreak of the American Civil War, and the next four years will see many commemorations of the terrible conflict that transformed forever the life of the United States. History in general overflows with lessons for leaders in all walks of life, but certain watershed events, like the fall of the Roman Republic, the French Revolution, and the World Wars of the 20^th century, offer perhaps more sharply-defined demonstrations of the dynamics of leadership and misleadership. The American Civil War is one of those especially illuminating episodes.

Obviously, the prodigious figure of Abraham Lincoln continues to dominate all discourse on the Civil War, and there are few finer examples of practical wisdom and integrity for leaders today in politics, business, and the professions. There is a vast literature on Lincoln, but the recent book, Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin would be as good a place to start as any. The central theme of the book is Lincoln’s determination to pick the best people for the job, regardless of all-too-human inadequacies and the undisguised antipathy they sometimes showed towards him. He accepted personal responsibility for managing conflict and dissent within his team.

The performance of many other famous people chosen to bear the mantle of leadership in that maelstrom – Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Nathan Bedford Forrest, George McClellan, William Sherman, and Ulysses Grant, to name an obvious few – dramatises the demands and duress of leadership in a time of upheaval and uncertainty. Again, there is a wealth of enlightening and entertaining historical analysis on all the major personalities, and even many less well-known ones, but the classic best-sellers by Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote will provide no end of insight and instruction for leaders today. Catton’s single-volume This Hallowed Ground would be an absorbing starting point.

The best video presentations of the tragedy and triumph of the conflict are Ken Burns’ superb documentary The Civil War, and Ronald F. Maxwell’s sweeping recreation of the battle of Gettysburg.

There is, however, much more to the leadership learning to be gained from the history of the Civil War than the characters and careers of the principle players. The great and enduring controversy centres on the cause of the conflagration, the Brothers’ War that tore apart not just a nation, but also communities and families. Obviously, the causes of any human conflict are complex in the extreme, and it was no different with the Civil War. Historians still contend with each other over the question as to whether the root cause was slavery or the constitutional issue of states rights. Did the seeds of the struggle lie in the institution of slavery itself, or in the federal constitution which balanced the power of the central government with that of the individual states? For example, if the New England states had felt they were being held back economically by the rural southern states, would they have had the right to secede from the Union? Would Arizona or Texas have the right to secede today?

Even though Lincoln had stated that he would leave slavery alone where it existed, believing as he did that it would die a natural death if it was not allowed to spread westwards, the political establishment in the southern states insisted that their state sovereignty was being violated. When they claimed the right to secede, and acted on it, they were declared to be in a state of rebellion against the United States and the war erupted.

Many southerners were opposed to slavery, and many northerners were racists, and as Lincoln pointed out, there were good and bad, weak and strong on both sides. People from north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line were sucked into the vortex created by the political wrangling that had troubled American politics for decades, but slavery had been an ugly scar on the nation for more than two centuries, and was a glaring contradiction of the ideals embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Federal Constitution.

Neutrality in life, in the face of the injustices we encounter in our communities and in our workplaces, as well as in other countries, is impossible; sooner or later the injustice affects the lives of all, and we must follow our conscience. This is a particularly tragic reality for those whose consciences have not been properly formed through genuine education at home, at school, and in the community at large.

As we remember the savage struggle that started in 1861, the next four years will be a good time for all leaders to reflect on their responsibility for the lives of others that is the core reality of leadership, and to grow the insight into human nature, culture, and conflict that is so sorely lacking in our world today.

The Poetry of Leadership

by Andre van Heerden

In the age of Wikileaks and leaky homes, conspicuous consumption and conspicuous corruption, with truth ensnared and trust a mythical grail no longer sought by anyone, leadership is a fugitive phenomenon. It seems as if no one knows, nor cares, what it means anymore, and the word’s currency in the media and the corridors of power rests solely on its usefulness as a social analgesic. Significantly, the loss has come at a time when poetry has all but disappeared from our cultural repertoire, and the affinity of leadership with poetry is compelling.

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose garden.

TS Eliot’s lines from his Four Quartets inspire in me the urge to take up the mantle of leadership with greater conviction in my own life and in my relations with others. For surely the whole point of life is to take the right passage, and to open the right doors to find the fulfilment we seek. It is the very essence of leadership to avoid the regrets and disappointments of untapped potential, indecision and drift, and a lack of vision. Creative vision based on reality is the form of leadership, and action is the substance; together they inspire oneself and others to strive for a better future.

Although it is the purpose of both poetry and leadership to inspire heroic endeavour in the face of life’s challenges, being roused once more to a determined and inventive response by a piece of verse is always a singular experience. For example, in contemplating the constantly daunting responsibilities of leadership, I am often drawn back into the gently-spoken wisdom in Blake’s Jerusalem. It is a message of hope, and leaders are measured by the hope in the hearts of their people.

I give you the end of a golden string

Only wind it into a ball

It will lead you in at Heaven’s Gate

Built in Jerusalem’s wall.

Leadership is not a game; it is the perilous contest of life itself, in which there is an inevitable final reckoning, whatever one’s religious affiliation might be. Leadership impacts on real flesh and blood people and their families and communities, shaping who they are and what they will become; and that is as true of the leader as it is of the led. That is why the uncompromising pursuit of truth and virtue, the bedrock of integrity, is the sine qua non of effective leadership. Any deviation from this principle is a descent into misleadership. Blake’s words emphasise that through all life’s dark tempests, truth alone will lead us to fulfilment.

Of course your fulfilment needs to be defined before you set out to pursue it, and our post-modern world, obsessed as it is with systems and methods, is notoriously inept when it comes to delineating a clear and decisive vision. The egregious misleadership that results is a common feature in politics, business, and society at large. Lewis Carroll, in his delightful The Hunting of the Snark, reminds us of the folly of ill-conceived, utopian goals, and the bewildering pitfalls that attend them.

But the principle failing occurred in the sailing

And the Bellman, perplexed and distressed

Said he had hoped, at least, when the wind blew due east

That the ship would not travel due west.

Whether it be a statesman like Mandela uniting his people, an entrepreneur like Steve Jobs unleashing a flood of creativity, or a teacher sparking the desire to learn in a group of enraptured young people, leadership is, to fall back on a beautiful cliché, poetry in motion. How sad that the phenomenon is evanescent today, menaced on every side as it is by the misleadership which toils only for more power. Shakespeare saw the danger four hundred years ago, spelling out the consequences in Troilus and Cressida, Act One, Scene Three.

Then everything includes itself in power,

Power into will, will into appetite;

And appetite, an universal wolf,

So doubly seconded with will and power,

Must make perforce an universal prey,

And last eat up himself.

As envisaged in the minds of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, leadership exemplifies the quest for goodness, truth, and beauty. Perhaps that is why, though science is an astonishingly productive tool in the hands of leaders, only poetry can in the end express the nobility of the leadership ideal, which requires nurturing in the family, development in self-leadership, and fulfilment in helping others to be the best that they can be. Mysteriously, life itself seems to be an on-going struggle between leadership and misleadership, for individuals, communities, and nations, and it is significant that in this time of proliferating crises, there seems to be a reawakening of interest in poetry. Perhaps that will inspire a renaissance of leadership.

Baruch Spinoza (1632 – 1677), was born to a Dutch Jewish family of Portuguese extraction, and grew up to become one of the foremost of the 17^th Century Rationalist philosophers who exerted such a strong influence on the 18^th Century Enlightenment. His fame was limited during his short life, and he worked for the most part as a humble lens grinder. His ideas led to his expulsion from the Jewish community in Holland, and the condemnation of his works by the Roman Catholic Church, but however one may view his standpoints on relativism, materialism, and determinism, he was no doubt a sincere and brilliant thinker seeking after truth. The quote above is proof of that.

“Peace is not an absence of war; it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.” Baruch Spinoza

COMMENT:

If history teaches us anything it is that there can never be any lasting security in an imposed peace. The people on whom it is imposed will sooner or later rise up against the injustices they would never have accepted voluntarily. This historical lesson is particularly pertinent in the business world today.

Peace is an ideal that can never be achieved until justice is achieved. Justice, of course, is a particularly challenging goal for human beings for the mere fact that unless it applies to everyone, it doesn’t really exist. Justice is either for all of us, or for none of us. The problem is compounded by the academic difficulty in defining the concept. I say “academic” because none of us really has too much trouble in recognising injustice when we see it.

The Rawlsian interpretation of justice as fairness suffers by dint of its semantic pliability and the consequent openness to abuse by ideologues. Perhaps we are obliged to stay with the Platonic definition: “giving each person his or her due.”

When there is justice, society (the contractual entity built on rights and obligations), becomes community (the shared thing built on respect and compassion). Leaders are required to be builders of community – in the home, the neighbourhood, the workplace, and the nation – misleaders will continue to be proponents of the imposed peace.

“An infallible method of conciliating a tiger is to allow oneself to be devoured.” - Konrad Adenauer

Konrad Adenauer (1876 – 1967), long-time mayor of Cologne and an opponent of the Nazis, was seventy-three when he became the first Chancellor of an economically and culturally devastated West Germany in 1949. He restored the fortunes and the reputation of the shattered nation, and became one of the architects of European unity. He faced down many tigers in his career, including Hitler and Stalin, and was recognised in a 2003 television poll as “The greatest German of all time”.


COMMENT:
It seems that we could use more Konrad Adenauers today – in business and the professions, as well as in politics and the bureaucracy. The propensity for tolerating bullying and intimidation in the workplace seems stronger than ever in spite of the widespread belief that society is more “egalitarian” and “fair-minded” than in the benighted past. Moreover, too many people in the West today are constantly cowed into silence by political correctness, never saying what needs to be said for rational debate to proceed.