LEADERS: MYTH AND REALITY BY STANLEY MCCHRYSTAL
BOOK REVIEWS BY BINOD
BINOD’S RATING: 7/10
A great warrior speaks on leadership.
Take Robert E. Lee, one of the author’s former heroes and, to this day, an icon at the U.S. Military Academy. On paper, Lee was the ideal leader. He excelled in every way possible for an Army officer in the decades before the Civil War. Yet Lee led the Confederate Army to a devastating defeat in the service of an immoral cause, that of slavery. And even today many see him as a great leader. How? Why? This example exposes the many paradoxes of leadership.
General Stanley McChrystal explores these, profiling thirteen famous leaders from a wide range of eras and fields--from corporate CEOs to politicians and revolutionaries.
Walt Disney and Coco Chanel built empires in very different ways. Both had public personas that sharply contrasted with how they lived in private.
Maximilien Robespierre helped shape the French Revolution in the eighteenth century; Abu Musab al-Zarqawi led the jihadist insurgency in Iraq in the twenty-first. We can draw surprising lessons from them about motivation and persuasion.
Both Boss Tweed in nineteenth-century New York and Margaret Thatcher in twentieth-century Britain followed unlikely roads to the top of powerful institutions.
Martin Luther and his future namesake Martin Luther King Jr., both local clergymen, emerged from modest backgrounds to lead world-changing movements. He was far younger, less experienced and recognized than many in the movement. His success stemmed from his convictions, persistence, and timing, not his woeful leadership skills.
McChrystal uses their stories to dig into how leadership works in practice and to challenge the myths that complicate our thinking about this critical topic. He cuts through pop culture theories about leadership to get to the core of what actually makes a leader, coming up with a new definition of who is a leader.
I particularly liked his exposé of the three myths:
The Formulaic Myth: our desire to tame leadership into a static checklist, ignoring the reality that leadership is intensely contextual, dependent upon the particular circumstances, times, and places
The Attribution Myth: our tendency of having a biased form of tunnel vision focused on leaders themselves and of attributing too much of an outcome to leaders, neglecting the agency of the group surrounding the leaders. We are led to believe that leadership is what the leader does whereas, in reality, real agency of leadership is bound up by a system of followers.
The Results Myth: our false assumption that leadership is seen as the process of driving groups of people toward outcomes, and their objective results are more important than their style or words or appearance. In reality, leadership describes what leaders symbolize more than what they achieve.
Other parts I learnt from were the sections on “Why the Great Man Theory Sticks” and the evolution of leadership studies from Plutarch to now.
Talking about Plutarch, his “Lives” revolves around a single question, “What sort of man was he?”. McChrystal started by asking the simple question “How did they lead?” but gradually modified to more nuanced questions like “Why did they emerge as a leader?” and “What was it about the situation that made this style of leadership effective?”.
Ultimately, McChrystal says that different environments will require different leaders, and that followers will choose the leader that they need. Aspiring leaders will be best served not by memorizing a standard set of textbook leadership qualities, but by learning to discern what is required in each situation.
My criticism? While he attempts to demolish myths, he doesn’t serve up any grand theory of leadership traits or skills and says that leadership is situational. That seems like a cop out. Also many of the profiles simply weren’t gripping enough and I skipped a few, finding real insight in the final 50 pages of analysis.
General Stanley McChrystal served for thirty-four years in the US Army, rising from a second lieutenant in the 82nd Airborne Division to a four-star general, in command of all American and coalition forces in Afghanistan. He resigned and then retired from the Army following a critical Rolling Stone magazine article that revealed comments by his staff deriding President Barack Obama and key figures in the administration.