Ramblemuse Touch Points

In the serendipity of looking through various RSS feeds, I came across Don Vandergriff’s recent post, The Best Leadership Article I have Seen, which reprints and links to William Deresiewicz’s lecture Solitude and Leadership posted on The American Scholar. I agree with Vandergriff that it is a very timely and thought provoking piece of writing. I also find it also lends perspective both to an article on the German concept of Auftragstaktik (mission tactics) and to some some blog posts on disincentives to pursue scientific research that has a long time constant (i.e. takes a long time to get results). I’m going to juxtaposition these three pieces, mostly by quoting from them, starting with Deresiewicz commenting on the students he encountered while at Yale.

So what I saw around me were great kids who had been trained to be world-class hoop jumpers. Any goal you set them, they could achieve. Any test you gave them, they could pass with flying colors. They were, as one of them put it herself, “excellent sheep.” I had no doubt that they would continue to jump through hoops and ace tests and go on to Harvard Business School, or Michigan Law School, or Johns Hopkins Medical School, or Goldman Sachs, or McKinsey consulting, or whatever. And this approach would indeed take them far in life. They would come back for their 25th reunion as a partner at White & Case, or an attending physician at Mass General, or an assistant secretary in the Department of State.

That is exactly what places like Yale mean when they talk about training leaders. Educating people who make a big name for themselves in the world, people with impressive titles, people the university can brag about. People who make it to the top. People who can climb the greasy pole of whatever hierarchy they decide to attach themselves to.

But I think there’s something desperately wrong, and even dangerous, about that idea. … That’s really the great mystery about bureaucracies. Why is it so often that the best people are stuck in the middle and the people who are running things—the leaders—are the mediocrities? Because excellence isn’t usually what gets you up the greasy pole. What gets you up is a talent for maneuvering. Kissing up to the people above you, kicking down to the people below you. Pleasing your teachers, pleasing your superiors, picking a powerful mentor and riding his coattails until it’s time to stab him in the back. Jumping through hoops. Getting along by going along. Being whatever other people want you to be, so that it finally comes to seem that, like the manager of the Central Station, you have nothing inside you at all. Not taking stupid risks like trying to change how things are done or question why they’re done. Just keeping the routine going. …

We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re worth doing in the first place. What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of exper­tise. What we don’t have are leaders.

What we don’t have, in other words, are thinkers. People who can think for themselves. People who can formulate a new direction: for the country, for a corporation or a college, for the Army—a new way of doing things, a new way of looking at things. People, in other words, with vision.

Now, it’s interesting to correlate Deresiewicz’s comments on leadership and the lack of it with a few quotes from Major General Werner Widder’s (German army) article on Auftragstaktik or “mission tacticts”.

Thus, Auftragstaktik is more than giving a mission to a subordinate and allowing him the latitude to execute it. Rather, it is the superior’s duty to specify the objective and the framework within which the subordinate has to accomplish the mission. The commander provides all resources required to carry out the mission. This, in turn, means that execution itself becomes the executor’s responsibility. His skills, creativity, and commitment will be the key elements of execution. Thus, Auftragstaktik is not merely a technique of issuing orders but a type of leadership that is inextricably linked to a certain image of men as soldiers.

The decisive foundation for Auftragstaktik is peacetime training with a deliberate focus on training soldiers to think independently and to act according to the superior commander’s intent. The superior’s specified objective, his confidence in his subordinates’ capabilities, his and his subordinates’ acceptance of their respective responsibilities, and their freedom to act are the four cornerstones of Auftragstaktik on the one hand and its secret on the other. The onus, nevertheless, still remains with the commander, who must provide the necessary means to accomplish the mission. …

Auftragstaktik is based on an image of man who values his individual dignity and freedom and who harnesses them to achieve superior strength. This concept is still valid for the 21st century. Based on the premise that leadership encompasses two aspects—being a role model and accepting responsibility—leadership requires competence, strength of character, trust, initiative, judgment, assertiveness, and decisionmaking ability at all command levels.

Because I have a primary interest in leadership as it pertains to the pursuit of good science, I want to bring the focus back to this arena by turning to Canadian GirlPostdoc’s blog posts on Slow Science gets the Shaft – Part I and Slow Science Gets the Shaft – Part Deux.

This anecdote is my way of saying, that as academic scientists we make choices on a daily basis to pursue what is expedient at the cost of what may turn out to be interesting, all because of the lack of time. This rushed time frame creates an environment that does not support slow science. …

An environment that uses a carrot (tenure) and stick (terminal contract) incentive model narrows people’s focus and destroys creativity. If you don’t believe me, listen to the facts put forward by Daniel Pink, in his TED talk (it’s worth 17 minutes of your time) on the science of motivation. Why would you spend time doing science that you think is worthwhile when it doesn’t get you the carrot. Instead, the choice is obvious, you do science that you know will work, ie get you the publications, the grants, all in the drive for tenure. This carrot and stick model leaves no room for innovation and creativity.

A second effect that this “if you do this then you will get this or else” atmosphere does is it creates and attracts a particular type of scientist to academia and selects against another. One academic I know, has said that he doesn’t participate in a project unless he sees a publication in it for himself. …

So the pursuit of science has become one of the bureaucracies that Deresiewicz refers to. One in which it is better to keep the routine going than to risk straying too far into the unknown. One in which there are disincentives to develop the kind of Auftragstaktik that Widder encourages of using local authority within the greater direction of endeavor of the scientific framework. It’s an open question, how we work to reverse the push toward the safety of mediocrity. It’s likely not going to happen unless the system of rewards are restructured to value the uncertain and ambiguous.