Definitions

• Direct leaders
  Like Churchill, they significantly influence the thoughts, behaviors, and feelings of others, through the stories they communicate to various audiences.
• Indirect leaders
  Like Einstein, these leaders exert their influence through the ideas they developed and the ways that those ideas were captured in some kind of theory or greatise. Any scholar who produces a work for publication is, however modestly, making a bid for indirect leadership (p. 40).
• Ordinary leaders
  They simply relate the traditional story of their group as effectively as possible (Gerald Ford, Georges Pompidou).
• Innovative leaders
  They take a story that has been latent in the population, or among the members of their chosen domain, and bring new attention or a fresh twist the story (Thatcher, deGaulle, Reagan).
• Visionary leaders
  Not content to relate a current story or reactivate a story drawn from a remote or recent past, these individuals create a new story, one not known to most individuals before, and achieve at least a measure of success in conveying this story effectively to others (Jesus, Confucius, Buddha, Gandhi).
• Leadership in a particular domain
  One assumes that the audience is already sophisticated in the stories, the images, and the other embodiments of the domain. Scientists know math, sociologists know cultures. Their audiences were primed for their appearance; they primed their audiences for further breakthroughs (Graham, Picasso, Graham). Creative artists, scientists, and experts in various disciplines lead indirectly, through their work.
• Leaders who reorient a political entity
  These are church, military, political, or business leaders who deal with individuals who bring an ordnary, relatively undisciplined frame of mind to their audience membership (like a 5 year old child). Leaders of institutions and nations lead directly, through the stories and acts they address to an audience.
• Inclusive leaders
  They seek to draw more people into their circle, rather than to denounce or exclude others.
• Story
  Gardner uses the terms story and narrative rather than message or theme, because leaders present a dynamic perspective to their followers, a drama that unfolds over time: where they are coming from, where they are going, what is to be feared, struggled against, and dreamed about.

Facets of leadership

• Power
  Power, by itself, cannot bring about any significant changes. It must be linked to specific messages and stories that can direct and inner circle and guide a wider populace.
• Policies
  These involve decisions to be made about policy and the processes whereby the designated policies are successfully implemented.
• The audience
  The public: the general public, or a specific part of the general public, with its particular needs, fears, and goals.
• Personality
  The leader's personal needs, psychodynamic traits, early life experiences, and relationships to other individuals.

Areas of leadership

• Classic domains of scholarship
  Science, music, etc. (Mead's anthropology, Oppenheimer's physics, Picasso's art, Stravinsky's music, Einstein's relativity).
• Leadership within institutions
  These are the classic establishments that have been with us for centuries (Marshall: the military, Pope John: the church, Sloan: the corporate world).
• Leadership of dissenting groups
  These are disenfranchised groups whose consciousness was raised by great leaders (Eleanor Roosevelt: women's rights; King: African-Americans).
• National leaders
  These leaders, like Margaret Thatcher, create and convey an innovative story to their constituencies, to address a number of distinct groups while giving voice and direction to the nation as a whole.
• Crisis leader
  These individuals presided over their nations in times of crisis (Lenin, Hitler, Chiang, Mao, Churchill, Roosevelt).
• Leaders of all human beings
  These people went beyond the nation-state and addressed all mankind, like Moses, and more recently, Gandhi.

Developmental psychology

• our primate status (with dominance and relationships),
• our proclivity to imitate (lower status people imitate higher status people), with the early emergence of our sense of self and that of others (our individual identity, labels referring to other individuals) and of identification with role models,
• the development in early childhood of powerful theories or "scripts" about the world (Piaget's "naive theories"), and
• the specific ensemble of traits that may mark the emerging leader and the emerging follower (this goes back to personality: witness Clinton's emphasis on positivity vs. Dole's "Nixon without the warmth").

Gardner talks about the mind of the 5 year old. Whereas leaders in specific disciplines deal with a sophisticated audience and seek to educate the unschooled minds of their audience, political leaders must begin by assuming that most of their audience members have a well-stocked 5 year old mind, with its naive theories and views, and thus, keep their messages simple and direct.

Factors of leadership

• A tie to the community or audience (a relationship)
• A certain rhythm of life (some time alone for reflection, some time presenting one's self to the audience and maintaining contact)
• An evident relation between stories and embodiments (preach something like the glory of Britain, the need for courage or law and order; you must also practice it and embody it)
• The centrality of choice (where there is no choice, there is only brute power)

The evolution of the story

Individuals go through four basic stages of evolution. During these stages, their theories about the world change, and so do their identifications with groups. Domain-specific leaders can address their stories to sophisticated audiences, but those who hope to lead political movements and address the masses must see their audience as unschooled, and keep their stories simple enough for children.

• The five year old mind
  They are dualistic, and construct the world by way of binary conflicts. They are ruthlessly rigid. They stereotype their "self", racially, physical appearance, strength, etc. They belong to one group: their family, their church, their state - that's it. They don't see multiple memberships.
• The ten year old mind
  They are fair to a fault. They take into account the intention underlying an action, as well as the action itself. They see the "self" in terms of proper behavior and spurn those whom they consider bad. They appreciate the existence of different groups, and hope to identify with positive groups and eschew negative ones.
• The adolescent mind
  They are skeptics; they revel in relativism. Friendships are dynamic and changing. Moral acts may harbor the seeds of iniquity. For "self", they see people as conglomerations of both good and bad traits, perhaps oscillating between both poles. Groups have long and complex histories, and no one group has a copyright on goodness or evil.
• The mature mind
  They can synthesize warring viewpoints, but do take a stand on what they personally believe in. For "self", they feel integrated with what they have accomplished, and how they are regarded in the community. They are the result of their past actions. They can assume a distance from the groups they belong to, realizing that if they were members of different groups they might think differently. But they choose a specific group, and attempt to justify its position.

The exemplary leader

• Willingness to confront others in authority. She identifies with and feels herself to be a peer of an individual in a position of authority. She is willing to be a risk taker, willing to challenge those in power. Perhaps she tends to be competitive and to enjoy achieving a position of control.
• She has worked out personal relationships with her family and those in her own inner circle, then begins to enlarge that circle to include other practitioners. She keeps up old contacts, not dropping them as they are no longer relevant to her current project. She also comes up with explanations or solutions that satisfy parties in a dispute.
• She expands her viewpoint by traveling outside of her homeland, living in radically different environments. (Reading the literature of other cultures helps a lot too!)
• Take time to master the domain in which she expects to make a breakthrough. This can take a decade or more. (Extra master's degrees help gain this professional competence as well.)
• Be attuned to an audience, either in her professional domain or in a wider sphere, that is posing basic questions and searching for guidance, particularly regarding issues of identity. She needs to work out answers to these basic questions, express them eloquently and embody them in her way of life.
• The less well defined the domain, institution, or constituency, the more important it is to invent a life for herself, to reflect on its implications, and then to share the resultant stories with others. These stories should not only make sense to her and to her own inner circle, but also to the larger circle she intends to influence.
• Leaders succeed, fail, return, recover, at one time or another. She must remain flexible, but not so flexible that she ceases to stand for anything.
• She is active in institutions and organizations that serve as the basis for her power and support (OK, OK, I'll join AECT!). This guarantees an authorized platform for her to tell her story and assure that it'll be listened to attentively.
• She takes opportunity to reflect. The demands of leadership are so overwhelming that, in the absence of time for reflection, she loses her sense of agency and can become controlled by other individuals or forces beyond her own control (Yes! This is right on!!)
• She faces her limitations. Opportunities come and go, stories grow old, strong accomplishments breed strong reactions. Construe a defeat as an opportunity, and put a positive spin on apparently unproductive experiences (e.g. the Tech Trends paper had to be totally rewritten and sent to another journal, where it got great reviews).

Recap: 6 constants of leadership

• The story: a leader has to have a central story or message.
• The audience: the audience has to be ready to hear it.
• The organization: enduring leadership ultimately demands some kind of institutional or organizational basis.
• The embodiment: the creator must in some sense embody his story, else he lacks credibility and appears hypocritical.
• Direct/indirect leadership: the transition is easier from indirect (domain-specific) to direct (to a more heterogeneous group).
• The issue of expertise: within a domain, an individual is unlikely to achieve any credibility unless her work is seen to be of high quality. Within evey domain, there is technical knowledge unavailable to most leaders or audience members; she must be able to call on that knowledge when needed.

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