Leadership roles are rarely so tightly scripted by time and circumstance that they leave little room for any given incumbent to make a difference. Mary Robinson’s inspirational performance as President of Ireland in the 1990s, constitutionally a very circumscribed position, is a case in point. Another, compelling example is that of Nelson Mandela, who continued to be such an inspiration to his followers and their cause even during his long years of incarceration. At the same time, having an opportunity to make an impact is not the same as making one. Even in the most enabling of contexts, where the “tide in the affairs of men” is ready to be “taken at the flood”, individual leaders must still have the talent to make the most of their opportunities and the conviction to rise to the defining challenges of their era.
A classic example is Pope John XXIII. As Howard Gardner (1995:166) writes in Leading Minds, “Elected only on the twelfth ballot, and already 77 years of age, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli was an improbable pope”. He certainly did not foresee the papacy as his destiny. Yet, he brought to the role a level of vision and drive that few could have expected, when the opportunity finally came his way. Three years into his papacy he reflected:
At seventy-seven years of age, everyone was convinced that I would be a provisional and transitional Pope. Yet here I am already on the eve of the fourth year of my pontificate, with an immense programme of work in front of me to be carried out before the eyes of the whole world, which is watching and waiting. As for myself, I feel like St. Martin, who
“neither feared to die, nor refused to live”.
What was it that had made Pope John so ready for a role that he had not anticipated?
To understand this fully would take more than a chapter in itself, but suffice it to note that context not only shapes the opportunity for leadership, it also shapes the forma- tion of leaders, their ideas, convictions and aspirations. Pope John, like most great leaders, was a man of his time and a man for his time, and when destiny called, he was ready to meet it. On his way up the Church hierarchy, Angelo Roncalli proved himself to be neither a radical, nor an “organization man”. He was a successful insider who never lost his individuality. For example, early in his career, he had a defining “run-in” with the Curia over the interest that his diocese had shown in the
“modernist” ideas of Church historian, Louis Duchesne. Roncalli neither reacted nor buckled under, but rather arrived at the personal conviction that “I can work in my own style, that is the style of a Church, that is both teacher of all and always modern according to the demands of the times and the places”. As a potential future leader
Inspirational Leadership in Business and Other Domains 107 he was already finding his own “voice”. Moreover, in his personal development as a priest, he applied himself as diligently to his “apprenticeship in spirituality” and “the science of the saints”, as any true professional or artist in any field dedicates himself to personal mastery and the mastery of his calling. So, as a future spiritual leader, he had paid his dues. As a future institutional leader, he had also paid his dues, writing many lengthy pastorals during his time as a bishop, “which in retrospect can be seen as preparation for the encyclicals that he would issue as pope”, Mater et Magistra and Pacem in Terris. Over a period of several decades, he had also researched deeply into the religious renewal that followed the Council of Trent, which helped to infuse his vision and embolden his spirit for his great Vatican II enterprise.
In the world of business, like those of Ecclesia, politics or the military, imag- ination and drive are more likely to distinguish outstanding performance at the institutional level than professional expertise. Yet many of the ways in which we try to categorize the energy and enterprise of great CEOs remain too generic, and fail to uncover the deeper wellsprings of inspirational leadership, which are always in themselves context-specific. Consider the notion of executive vision. It is context that gives vision real meaning for people. Lacking context, vision is little more than image or fantasy. This is one reason why many corporate mission statements turn out to be ineffective and lack gut-grabbing meaning, as Built to Last authors, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras (1996), have often argued. A compelling vision conjures up not just powerful imagery, but also deep emotional resonance, stretching not only the muscles of the mind but also the sinews of the soul, and it tends to be deeply rooted in values, convictions and principles of a more transcendent nature.
We see this illustrated in the case of Dr. Tom Walsh, the inspirational founding director of An Foras Taluntais (the Irish agricultural research institute), known to all of his staff at the time as the “Doc” (Leavy 1992; Leavy and Wilson 1994). The deep-rooted passions that drove the Doc., the convictions that helped him raise the sights of his young scientists and inspire them, particularly during the formative phase of the institute’s development in the early 1960s, were his nationalism and his unshakable belief in the power of science to solve the problems of Irish agriculture.
These were the contextual factors that helped him link his leadership to a higher purpose, and enlist his eager young scientists to the cause. The Doc. was too young to have seen active service during the Irish struggle for independence, but he was brought up in a household steeped in the republican tradition and deeply immersed in the great historical events that surrounded his early upbringing. He came to see it as the patriotic duty of his generation of Irish leaders to help secure the country’s economic independence, where the previous generation had fought for its political freedom, and he was convinced that the revival of Irish agriculture was the key to this ambition, because “Ireland’s mine” was “on the top of the land”.
Edmund Wilson once said “the poetry of Lincoln has not all been put into his writings. . .. He created himself as a poetic figure, and he thus imposed himself on the nation” (quoted in John Gardner, 1990: 29). For psychologist, Howard Gardner, the essence of inspirational leadership lies in this ability to create and act out com- pelling stories, particularly stories of collective identity, which appeal to both reason and emotion. The ability not only to communicate an elevating vision but also to
108 B. Leavy embody it was perhaps the singular aspect of Pope John XXIII’s leadership, a vision that combined the pastoral and the institutional in a way that few of his predecessors had been able to do. As Gardner (1995:176) explained:
In few other individuals were the means and the messages more closely and more convinc- ingly intertwined than in the person of Pope John. To the members of his church, Pope John decried bureaucratic intrigue among those at the top of the authority structure and called for a return to the simple teachings of Christ. The church had to go back to its roots, which acknowledged the essential worth of all human beings. Within the church, there were not to be privileged groups or orders; as he put it, the pope’s love was not to be any greater for Italy than for the Philippines. Pope John emphasized the story that he had been creating over many decades. It was possible, the pope believed, to be both traditional and modern.
If vision devoid of context is often little more than fantasy and wishful think- ing, communication without embodiment is often little more than image and spin.
Ronald Reagan was widely acknowledged by political friends and foes alike as the
“great communicator”, laying the emphasis on his unique mass media skills, but Reagan himself preferred to be known as the “communicator of great things”, de- flecting the attention onto his message. The hallmark of Reagan’s leadership was values first, strategy second. As David Gergen (2001: 223–5), his communications chief, later reflected: “America has always been a creed as well as a place”, and Reagan “brought that creed out of mothballs” and “made it the centerpiece of his strategy”. Unlike Jimmy Carter, who had chided Americans about their growing malaise, Reagan did not lecture his countrymen but rather invited them to live in a more positive way. “He was telling them fundamental truths about themselves and the country that might otherwise be lost,” and that is why the people responded to him. They also responded to him because of what they could read into him as well as what they were hearing from him. Gergen also captures this essential insight well as follows:
Speeches take place within a context, never in a vacuum. Listeners bring to the occasion not only their dreams and aspirations but a range of questions about the speaker. Who is he down deep? What does he stand for? Does he speak with authority? Does he care about people like me? Can I place my faith and trust in him? Who the speaker is speaks as loudly as anything he does (p. 215).
Traditionally, the world of business leadership has tended to emphasize numbers before narrative and facts before values, but this is rapidly changing. More and more corporate leaders are coming to recognize that while facts and numbers can persuade, they rarely inspire the way that stories do. As Robert McKee (1997: 12), one of Hollywood’s leading screenwriting coaches, explains: “Our appetite for story is a reflection of the profound human need to grasp the patterns of living – not merely as an intellectual exercise, but within a very personal, emotional experience”.
Great enterprises, like Wal-Mart, are usually built on very potent founding stories, embodied in larger-than-life characters like Sam Walton. Talented inheritors like David Glass, Walton’s successor, keep the spirit alive and maintain its momentum.
In their turn, great revitalisers reinterpret a shared legacy and make it relevant to new and formidable challenges. For example, in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the world watched mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, brilliantly rediscover the spirit
Inspirational Leadership in Business and Other Domains 109 and resilience of the “The New Yorker” and articulate it in a new and compelling way that helped to rally the city at a time of great uncertainty and distress. Likewise, during his 20-year tenure as CEO, we saw how Jack Welch rekindled the American dream within that country’s leading business institution, reaffirming to the business world that the larger company need not lose its entrepreneurial flair and capacity for innovation as it grows, in spite of much depressing evidence to the contrary.
Great companies love their history, and are resilient in adversity. One of the most remarkable business turnarounds in the last quarter of a century has been the revival of Harley Davidson, the iconic motorcycle company. Harley Davidson came very close to going under in the early 1980s. It was rescued through a management buy- out, by a leadership with a genuine passion for the company’s history and what it stands for – individuality, freedom, and a little of the “wild” side of what it means to be human. Few companies have ever managed to forge such a strong identification among their major stakeholders, including management, employees and customers alike. The leadership at Harley Davidson understands better than most that it is a company’s unique history that gives it an identity and a “personality” that people can relate to, much more than any particular bundle of financial or material assets.
In a recent annual report, the company described the Harley Davidson phenomenon as follows:
Ours is quite a story. It’s a real-life saga of perseverance, ingenuity and pride. A chronicle of pivotal decisions that turned our backyard enterprise into one of world’s most recognized and admired companies. And a legacy of extraordinary people and innovative products that determined a history of success – and a future full of promise. (Annual Report 2002: 4).