Solitude and Leadership

I recently came across an essay entitled “Solitude and Leadership” by William Deresiewicz, which has been named a finalist for a National Magazine Award in the category Essays and Criticism (winners will be announced next week). The article, published in the Spring 2010 issue of American Scholar, is the transcript of a lecture the author gave at West Point in October 2009. I thought I’d mention a few of the points Deresiewicz – who taught English at Yale until 2008 – makes about leadership:

• Although a large part of the American elite (“the people in charge of government, business, academia, and all our major institutions – senators, judges, CEOs, college presidents, and so forth”) comes from Ivy League institutions or West Point, Deresiewicz had difficulty viewing his students as leaders, and he argues thatexceptional achievement does not equate leadership. (“Great heart surgeons or great novelists or great shortstops may be terrific at what they do, but that doesn’t mean they’re leaders.”)

• He discusses the number of extracurricular activities that high school students must have on their resume to be viable candidates to the top colleges (hint: six is not enough), and describes the students who do get admitted as “great kids who had been trained to be world-class hoop jumpers” or, in the words of a student herself, “excellent sheep”. It seems that universities’ goal has become to “educat[e] people who make a big name for themselves in the world, people with impressive titles, people the university can brag about.” This, of course, has little to do with leadership.

• Here comes the best part of the article – the discussion of Heart of Darkness, the novel by Joseph Conrad – set “in the Belgian Congo three generations before Vietnam” – which inspired the movie Apocalypse Now by Francis Ford Coppola. More specifically, Deresiewicz discusses the bureaucracy angle to the story. Make sure you read the quote of Conrad’s novel that starts with “He was commonplace in complexion” and later the paragraph by Deresiewicz that begins with “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?”

• I also enjoyed learning more about the career path of General David Petraeus, who apparently annoyed his supervisor when he “develop[ed] the strategy he would later formulate in the Counterinsurgency Field Manual” because he “was way ahead of the leadership” and was assigned what was regarded as a dead-end job. “But he stuck to his guns, and ultimately he was vindicated.” 

• I loved the part about researchers at Stanford who have shown students, contrary to what they believe, do not actually multitask effectively. I completely agree – I am a big proponent of doing only one task at a time, and also taking breaks from technology (especially cell phones and email) for increased focus. “[Researchers] found that in every case the high multitaskers scored worse. They were worse at distinguishing between relevant and irrelevant information and ignoring the latter… they were worse at… “mental filing”… their minds were more disorganized. And they were even worse at the very thing that defines multitasking itself: switching between tasks.”

• Deresiewicz then completes the lecture by elaborating on his original point of introspection, the sort of independent thinking made possible by solitude, which is necessary now to, later, “find the strength and wisdom to challenge an unwise order or question a wrongheaded policy” – in the same way, I think, that you want to have made a plan for action in the face of emergencies before they arise, Deresiewicz urges West Point plebes to consider dilemmas now “so you will have the strength to deal with them when they arise.”

“Solitude and Leadership” was an outstanding read. It is in competition for the National Magazine Award.

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