thoughts on leadership, can a leader be technical?
A leader is a salesperson.
A leader packages all of the following (AND 50% MORE, limited time restrictions apply offer restricted where prohibited) up into a short quip that is easily digestible.
A leader is postured and/or positioned to deliver an easy answer to complicated questions.
You could probably skip all the way down to the last few points now.
—- dragons —–
Analysis does NOT achieve the same result.
Analysis means lengthy discussion which may not even result in answers.
Science and the scientific method struggle to address questions of ethics, philosophy, morality, and religion.
Perhaps, the closest we come to an answer to these questions comes from group consensus (can be fickle).
Even after consensus, the answers we arrive at are solutions/codes that apply mostly to individuals within a group, not the group itself.
The behavior of organizations is difficult to reason about and regulate.
Group morality and ethics may even be entirely different from that applied to its individuals.
Leaders are one of the few members of an organization that attempt to assume the role of the group at large.
As such, we may assume from this that leader ethics and morality are different from others in the group.
There are obvious reasons why leaders would want to hide this fact, if true, from the group itself (perhaps even from themselves).
Others (perhaps many) within the group may realize the two previous points and accept it as necessary or beneficial.
See comments elsewhere about distrusting and limiting the power of leaders and regulators.
We expect but limit what may be seen in groups/leaders as corruption from the POV of the individual.
— /dragons —-
Due to the complexity of all this, very few of us linger long on these thoughts, but all of us take something away from it when we go.
When we meet someone who seems to know more about this than we do, we are happy to let them have control as long as their philosophy impresses us.
We all have different ways in which we are impressed. See sadism, masochism, and probably other ism’s