Harlan Cleveland, one of the world's top thinkers about leadership, developed his way of thinking as a successful executive leader--in government under four presidents, in three universities, and in private enterprise. In this book, drawn from writings around the edges of a leader's life during half a century, he distills his insights and wisdom on the future of leadership-"the get-it-all-together profession."

The fourteen essays in this collection have an underlying theme: with everything getting more complicated, nobody can possibly know enough to be in general charge of anything really interesting or important. Cleveland argues that this means everybody has a chance to be partly in charge; but since most people won't reach for the brass ring, those who do will be leaders, mostly self-selected.

Nobody in Charge suggests how and why the worldwide spread of knowledge, speeded and enhanced by information technology, is fundamentally changing what it takes to bring people together to make something different happen-in business and government and education and in international affairs. Sprinkled with stories from his own experience and observation, Cleveland describes the attitudes, qualities, and learnings that will work best for people who point the way, create networks, build organizations, and inspire others to act. He also examines the ethics of public leadership and the education of citizens-in societies where a rapidly growing proportion of citizens will opt for leadership.

One of the most renowned thinkers and insightful writers on leadership of our time, Harlan Cleveland has seen numerous trends come and go and weathered many drastic changes in leadership and management-from the rise of the "company man" to the advent of the leaderless, self-managed organization. In this collection of essays-the newest addition to the Warren Bennis Signature Series--he draws on his vast experience to apply his thoughts to leadership. In each essay, Cleveland focuses on an intriguing insight about leadership-illustrated by stories from his own experience -offering thoughtful perspective on what 21st century leaders will face in the new knowledge environment.

Harlan Cleveland has founded and led a variety of institutions and held many leadership positions over a long and illustrious career. After World War II, he managed postwar relief and rehabilitation for the U.N., first in Italy then in China, and was thereafter a top official in the Marshall Plan. He was executive editor, then publisher, of The Reporter magazine in New York, and dean of Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship. President John F. Kennedy appointed him Assistant Secretary of State for U.N. and other international organizations; President Lyndon B. Johnson sent him to Europe as U.S. Ambassador to NATO. He was then, successively, president of the University of Hawaii, director of International Affairs at the Aspen Institute, and founding dean of the University of Minnesota's Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs. He is currently a board member of the American Refugee Committee, the Joyce Mertz-Gilmore Foundation, and the World Future Society, and president emeritus of the World Academy of Art and Science.

Nobody in Charge

Essays on the Future of LeadershipBy Harlan Cleveland

John Wiley & Sons

ISBN: 0-7879-6153-1

Chapter One

The Get-It-All-Together Profession

Paradox of Participation

There was a time, celebrated in song and story, when leadership was entrusted to people called leaders. Their numbers were tiny, their information scarce, their expertise primitive, the range of their options narrow, the reach of their power marginal, the scale of their actions limited. But they were at least presumed to be "in charge."

In those days it was possible to believe that policy was actually made by people others called policymakers. The policymaking few made broad decisions, it was said (and even taught in schools). A much larger group of unsung experts, civil servants, and employees converted these principles into practices. The obligation of most people was to comply with the regulations, pay the taxes and prices established by the few, and acquiesce in the seizure of power by divine right, coup d'tat, corporate takeover, or elections sometimes bought or stolen.

In Aristotle's Athens, Confucius's China, Cicero's Rome, Charlemagne's Europe, and Jefferson's Virginia, the educated and affluent few did the social planning and made the destiny decisions that made the difference between war and peace, poverty and prosperity, individual freedom and collective coercion, minority rights and majority rule. The mostly uneducated "lower orders" of slaves, servants, peasants, workers, and merchants-and most women-were not expected and did not expect to join in the elegant conversations about policy. In those vertical, pyramidal societies, dogma, doctrine, and dictation were the natural style of leadership.

Somewhere along the way in the colorful story of people getting things done, the collection of processes we now call modernization made the vertical society obsolete. Man-as-manager had to learn how to manage the complexity that man-as-scientist-and-engineer and man-as-educator were making both possible and necessary. In a world of intercontinental conflict, gigantic cities, congested living, and large and fragile systems of all kinds, the traditional modes of leadership, featuring "recommendations up, orders down," simply did not work very well. Nobody could be fully in charge of anything, and the horizontal society was born.

The key to the management of complexity was the division of labor. The benefits of modernization were available only to societies that educated most of their people to function as specialists in a division-of-labor economy. Thus there came to pass, late in the second millennium A.D., slaveless societies that responded to a technological imperative by giving citizenship to all their people and legislating education as an entitlement for all their citizens. Thomas Jefferson foresaw this macrotrend as early as 1813. "An insurrection has ... begun," he wrote to John Adams, "of science, talents, and courage, against rank and birth, which have fallen into contempt." He was spending his postpresidential years building the University of Virginia and promoting education and scholarship from his Monticello home.

When every man, and now every woman too, is entitled to earn through education an admission ticket to active citizenship, when leadership is not the province of a few hundred noblemen, a few thousand big landholders and shareholders, but is shared among an aristocracy of achievement numbering in the millions, decision making is done not by a club but by a crowd. So the core issue of executive leadership is a paradox of participation: How do you get everybody in on the act and still get some action?

Leading by Doing

If the get-it-all-together people used to be born to rank and wealth, now they are mostly made-and self-made-by competition and competence. This is true not only in the United States. Today, in all but a rapidly dwindling number of still-traditional societies, men and women become leaders by what they do.

Even among authoritarian regimes, the nations still governed by extended families (Saudi Arabia, and some of the Emirates in the Persian Gulf) are greatly outnumbered by those ruled by self-appointed tyrants who got where they are by elbowing their way to power (often by coup d'tat), and usually to personal prosperity as well. The closest thing to a ruling class is to be found these days in totalitarian regimes; in each of them, a small group of people who have fought their way up the bureaucratic ladder maneuver for power and preferment and, when they get to the top, achieve only a precarious lifetime tenure-sometimes shortened by sudden death.

In the United States and the other industrial democracies in the Atlantic Community and the Pacific Basin, the aristocracy of achievement is now growing in size and pervasive in function. These people are usually leaders because they want to be-often assisted, selected, promoted, or adopted as protgs by earlier achievers. (None of us, of course, can lead in everything we touch; all of us are followers in most of our life and work.)

People may be leaders in public or private employ, but that distinction is increasingly indistinct in our mixed economy. They may be leaders in politics or business or agriculture or labor or law or education or scientific research or journalism or religion or community issues; some swing from branch to branch in the forest of occupations; some specialize in advocacy or lobbying on policy issues ranging from abortion rights to the municipal zoo. They may be in the establishment or in the antiestablishment. Their writ, conferred or chosen, may run to community affairs, to national decisions or global issues, to a whole multinational industry or to a narrower but deeper slice of life and work: a single firm, a local agency, a neighborhood.

I have tried several times to count the number of leaders in the United States of America. In the mid-1950s, because I was publisher of a magazine I wanted them to buy, I counted 555,000 "opinion leaders." A 1971 extrapolation of that figure came out at about a million. Seven out of ten of these were executive leaders of many kinds of organizations; this "aristocracy of achievement" was estimated in 1985 at one out of every two hundred Americans. After that I gave up: the knowledge revolution keeps multiplying the numbers of Americans who take the opportunity to lead, at one time or another, on one issue or another, in one community or another.

The galloping rate of growth of complexity means that a growth curve of the requirement for leaders (if anyone were clever enough to construct such an index) would show a steeper climb than any other growth rate in our political economy.

Attitudes of Leadership

Every person who seeks or assumes a leadership role in an information-rich society has to develop some of the aptitudes and attitudes of the generalist. Generalists have to be skeptical of inherited assumptions-because so many of them are being undermined so fast by the informatization of society.

They have to be curious about science-based technology-because those who would control it must first understand, not how it works, but what it can do for us and to us. (That's the way most of us understand an automobile: we can't fix it, but we're good at driving it.) They have to be broad in their perspective-to take account of the disappearing distinctions between public and private and between domestic and foreign. They have to be eager to pull people and ideas together-rather than split them apart. They have to be really...