Joseph Nye on Leadership
Not finding a suitable introduction to leadership for students at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where he teaches, Joseph Nye wrote one himself.
Mr. Nye has written elsewhere on the topic — especially on "soft power" in foreign policy — and held high posts in the Departments of State and Defense and at the Kennedy School. To his credit, "The Powers to Lead" (Oxford University Press, 240 pages, $21.95) at once ranges broadly and is concise. Anecdotes run from Lyndon Johnson and Jack Welch to Mahatma Gandhi, whom Mr. Nye especially admires, and the book treats the latest "leadership as process" theories alongside Machiavellian realism and Lao Tzu's self-effacing style. All these, together with many sensible suggestions for advancing oneself, are presented with a clear focus on power and group needs.
Leadership, according to Mr. Nye, is a relation between leaders and followers, and requires a mix of hard power — coercion — and soft power — persuasion and inspiration. Later chapters consider the traits, skills, and "contextual intelligence" thus required, and attempt some ethical guidance.
The problem with "The Powers to Lead" is the moral-political abstractness of the guiding thesis. Mr. Nye offers a universal definition: A leader is one who seeks power to develop and effectuate the shared goals of a group — one who mixes soft with hard power in what Mr. Nye calls "smart power." But this level of generality includes the Mafia don, a prince of the church, a political zealot who rises with his fellow zealots, and the grifter who shares a cut with his henchmen. It elides the crucial distinction between a leader who fulfills his duties and a slacker, grifter, despot, or criminal. This is partly because Mr. Nye chooses to work through abstract notions of leadership, rather than, field-by-field, official responsibilities and exemplary models. But an American judge who merely seeks power for the shared goals of his group of judges or partisans is, generally speaking, a threat to the office of judge, not a leader worth imitating. A modern country needs statesmen in politics and business, not merely "policy entrepreneurs" clever at intimidating and manipulating.
Mr. Nye does acknowledge that his big theory applies best to democracies — those social-political networks in which goals are necessarily shared — and in such circumstances he favors especially leadership that preserves "autonomy and choice." But how to reconcile this preference with his celebration of leadership by power seekers?
Mr. Nye suggests that leadership is a mutual "process," an interdependence of leader and followers. In this line of argument, Mr. Nye doubts differences in ambition and intelligence, is skeptical of "heroic" or great-man theories, says that everybody can be a leader, and even denies that leaders create events or structures, they only anticipate them. How this fits with his own celebration of transformational leadership, and with his suggestion that a leader must "create a culture," is an open question.
There is an oddly optimistic complacency in Mr. Nye's principle of "interdependence." He seems to suppose that the dangers posed by hierarchical leadership — chiefly, abuse of authority — are declining as certain historical processes undermine hierarchy — namely democratization, globalization, and information sharing. Bloggers abound, and knowledge spreads rapidly on the Internet; executives have to satisfy engineers who know, and understand, more than they used to.
But surely there are also contrary signs. Globalization empowers sophisticated managers, who put production where costs and wages are cheapest. Technological innovation gives greater power and wealth to capital, to innovators, and to cartels and corporations who control many of the processes of innovation. Actual power has moved from popular electorates and communities toward distant councils and executives. Consider the European Union.
Mr. Nye concludes by discussing a leader's ethics. After hesitantly touching on various schools, he moves toward an ethics that encompasses those outside the group as well as inside. There could be good sense in this. But does not Mr. Nye's universalistic version again elide the key distinctions? An exemplary school in a terrible neighborhood, for instance, had better concentrate on its own goals and priorities rather than those of its neighbors. An exemplary country should do likewise. Mr. Nye's formulation abstracts in particular from the patriotism and sturdy virtue and spirit needed to defend actual democracies. He criticizes "extreme" patriotism, while never defending its milder, positive forms, and speaks of followers' "needs," especially for "meaning," rather than of their demands, duties, virtues, and rights.
Mr. Faulkner is a professor of political science at Boston College and the author of "The Case for Greatness: Honorable Ambition and Its Critics."
