Leadership, leverage, and exploitation

One reaction I get to my definition of leadership is that, on the surface, it sounds very exploiting. I don’t look at it that way.The idea of leverage is neutral. The outcome of that leverage is what we judge as evil, oppressive, greedy, good, self serving, or heroic. Ghandi leveraged other people’s abilities to bring …

Leverage

The idea of leverage, as I’m using it, has to do with being able to significantly extend your personal ability (output) through others. That’s what leveraging human capital is all about. If you are a supervisor and have two people working for you, but they basically are producing as much as you could on your …

What is leadership?

My definition of leadership is actually quite simple. An individual’s leadership ability is the difference between what they alone can accomplish and what they can accomplish through others. Leadership is about leverage. Sometimes that leverage is for the good, sometimes not. But, if you are leveraging yourself you are a leader. The more you are …

If being a leader is “good”, then is being a follower “bad”?

I’ve struggled with the notion that you can’t define a leader without defining a follower. However, I’ve come to think of that differently. It is true that you need both. However, I think that the notion of “follower” has turned into something bad. Perhaps it is because of all of the emphasis on becoming a …