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Leadership and Management

    Leadership and management: are they same? Well yes. And no. It is very possible for a person to be a manager without being a leader. A manager can easily be a paper shuffler. Collect the incoming mail and
answer it. Call to see if a bill has been paid. Mitigate disputes between members of the managed. Prepare a report. Present a campaign. Toe the party line. Espouse the company policy to the exclusion even of common sense. Play by the rules. Take a salary and look forward to the weekend, the vacation, and retirement. Be primarily an organizational functionary.


    A leader does many other things: selects a direction, finds the resources, exhorts to excellence, prepares and implements a model, overcomes obstacles, and celebrate successes. Could a manager be a leader? Yes, certainly. Could a leader be a manager? Quite possibly, but it is certain that a leader sees beyond the day to day operations into the realm of the possible and then puts together the supports necessary to get the goals accomplished through the collective efforts of the group.

     Only in the last quarter century have we given any serious consideration to leadership. The study of management dates back, we know, at least to the 1300s. The practice of management dates back to
pre-Biblical times, back 7,000 years to the records known to be kept by the Sumerians. We know that leadership via "divine" authority existed around 2,000 B.C. in Egypt, as ruled by the Pharaohs. The modern day concepts of organization, decentralization, management by exception, and leadership appeared during the exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt. Exodus, Chapter 23, verses 25 and 26 state:

"And Moses chose able men out of all Israel and made them heads over the people, rulers of thousands, rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens, and they judged the people at all seasons; the hard cases they brought to Moses, but every small matter they judged themselves."

    By the 1400s, financial controls had been placed upon management, with the development of double entry bookkeeping in Italy, specifically in a state-owned business known as The Arsenal of Venice.

    By the 1500s, we were treated to the theories of Niccolo Machiavelli, who held that organizational authority flowed from the bottom upward, and who further introduced the idea that each organization has two types of leaders: the appointed and the anointed.

    The Industrial Revolution of the late 1700s reestablished top-down authority, as the workers necessary to keep the machines in operation required minimal training, but required a high level of availability to
maintain success. The result was the amassing of capital, highlighted by an author of the period, Adam Smith, and his book, The Wealth of Nations (short title). The problem insofar as the workers were concerned was that the work was dehumanizing, as the engine of capitalism swallowed the availability of manpower, and the role of the leadership was merely to
ensure to continued supply of this manpower. The dehumanizing practices
of this industrial revolution would continue into the early 20th century,
and were revealed to the public by Sinclair Lewis in his book, The Jungle, published circa 1910.

    Karl von Clausewitz was a Prussian General who wrote about war and the management of armies. In his book, entitled On War, written in 1832, he outlined the strategic principles of war and based its conclusions on two aspects: strategy and tactics. Leaders determine strategy. Tactics are those actions taken by the people who are the led. Al Ries and Jack
Trout espouse the principles of Von Clausewitz in two 1980's publications, Guerilla Marketing, and Marketing Warfare. Both are excellent reading for the potential leader, to say nothing of the
potential marketer.

    In the years surrounding the American Civil War, laws were passed allowing the development of corporations, and suddenly leadership and managerial knowledge became important to the development of the country.


With this acquisition of intensive capital came also the development of managerial theory. By the turn of the 20th Century, economists, engineers, and writers of every stripe were working to develop leadership
models for the training of managers of newly emerging businesses. By the late 1800s, workflow and time studies would lead us into an era of scientific management. A respected leader of this movement, Frederick Taylor, in Shop Management, would espouse these principles:

* Good management should pay high wages and have low production costs.

* Control of manufacturing operations must be made possible by methods research.

* Workers required precise training and should be placed where that training could best be used.

* Close working relationships should exist between labor and management.

    Other schools of thought would emerge. Among them was the process approach to leadership. Harrington Emerson, our first recorded efficiency engineer, espoused 12 points of process management. The ones pertinent to us are:

* Clearly defined ideal (goals).
* Common Sense
* Competent workers
* Discipline of rules
* Justice and fairness
* Reward for efficiency

    Henri Fayol, a French writer during the First World War, attempted to install what would become known as an executive's view of leadership. His ideas didn't catch on until after World War II, due primarily to the necessity for war materiel and the implementation of Frederick Taylor's shop theories to see that done.

    By the 1930s, the Behaviorists' School of Leadership had emerged. The premise here was that the worker was pre-eminent and that considerations of fulfilling the needs of the workers should take precedence over
production, with the result that production schedules would be more than met. A 1927 experiment by Elton Mayo at the Western Electric facilities in Chicago found that both increases and decreases in illumination of work areas had a positive effect upon the workers. It would ultimately be determined that it wasn't the light that was the motivator, it was the
attention to the worker's interest that caused the positive changes.

    The Behaviorist school gave way to the Social Systems School of Leadership. Father of the concept was Chester Barnard who, in The Functions of the Executive, held that individuals could be induced to cooperate if they (1) understood what work was to be done, (2) believed that work to be consistent with the goals of the organization, (3) believed it to be compatible with their own interests, and (4) were able to comply with the request.

    The 1950s and onward saw great expansion in what became known as the
Quantitative School of leadership. Leading by the numbers has been a practice enhanced by the invention and wide proliferation of computers.  Computer pioneer John von Neumann developed the Monte Carlo method of
decision-making.

    In this realm, the cautious leader does nothing that is not defended by statistics or by poll, not always the most effective way to lead, for leadership is not, by definition, the most popular of pursuits. Have you ever seen the vignette that begins, "We the unwilling, led by the
unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful, using the unavailable. We have done so much for so long with so little that we are now qualified to do anything with nothing."

Tomorrow Night -- Leadership Theories