Leaders
Myth and Reality
I got this book after I saw General Stanley McChrystal’s blurb on the back of Ryan Holiday’s Lives of the Stoics. I read it in one 8.8-hour Deep Work-filled day. It’s fantastic. McChrystal uses Plutarch and his profiles of some of history’s most prominent figures as his inspiration and focuses on thirteen leaders in six pairs plus one standing alone. Almost all leadership books are prescriptive in nature. This book is not. Rather than make us believe that there’s a nice, simple recipe for leadership, McChrystal, Eggers and Mangone present us with the “myths” of leadership and the MUCH MESSIER “realities” of leadership. After the profiles of the thirteen leaders, the authors present the three myths of leadership and their new definition of leadership. We end the book with the sober recognition of just how complex, dynamic and context-specific good leadership is. It’s a challenging, important book that’s difficult to distill into a nice and tidy and practical 6-page Note but I’m excited to share some of my favorite Ideas as we all continue to step up into our own idiosyncratic expressions of Heroic leadership. So... Let’s get to work!
Big Ideas
- Leaders are (and leadership is!) ComplexSo are leaders.
- The HeroesShow us all what we’re capable of.
- A human need for heroesLet’s write YOUR Heroic story.
- Redefining LeadershipThe myths and the new definition.
- Mastering LeadershipIs a process that NEVER ends.
“This book is our attempt to take that first step toward a general theory of leadership. Inspired by [David] Brooks’s question [Who would Plutarch write about today?], we have mimicked Plutarch’s structure by profiling thirteen famous leaders in six pairs and one standing alone: Robert E. Lee. Like Plutarch, each of our paired chapters opens with a brief introduction and ends with a comparison of the two profiled leaders, in hopes that the juxtaposition of the profiles will reveal the complexity of leadership and shed light on the way most of us end up seeing the myth instead of the reality. …
The profiles are selected and crafted to be educational and entertaining. Not all of our figures were good leaders, or even good people. Some succeeded because they were talented, some because they were extraordinarily committed, some through luck, and some never truly tasted success at all. Right or wrong, success or failure, each was a significant factor in the outcome we see as history today. …
Don’t scan the text for new leadership checklists. We will use stories to challenge traditional leadership models, but we stop short of prescribing how to lead. It is our hope that by helping to dismantle some common myths we will create space for you and other leaders to interact with reality and respond to your challenges with clear thinking and humility.
Finally, by itself, Leaders will not make you into a great leader. It won’t overcome weak values, a lack of self-discipline, or personal stupidity. Instead of simplifying the challenge of leading, Leaders will outline and underscore the complexities. Leadership has always been difficult, and in the face of a rapidly changing environment, it will only get harder.
But it won’t be impossible, and it will be essential.”
~ General Stanley McChrystal from Leaders
I got this book after I saw General Stanley McChrystal’s blurb on the back of Ryan Holiday’s Lives of the Stoics. I read it in one 8.8-hour Deep Work-filled day. It’s fantastic.
Both Ryan and General McChrystal (and his co-authors Jeff Eggers and Jason Mangone) use Plutarch and his profiles of some of history’s most prominent figures as their inspiration.
Whereas Ryan features twenty-six Stoics, McChrystal focuses on thirteen leaders in six pairs plus one standing alone. We’ve featured a number of books on leadership including Leadership in Turbulent Times by Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Leadership Challenge by Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner, On Becoming a Leader by Warren Bennis, Lead Yourself First by Raymond M. Kethledge and Michael S. Erwin, The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership by John Maxwell, and Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. We also have our 60-minute class in which I share 10 of favorite ideas in Leadership 101.
Almost all of those books are prescriptive in nature. This book is not. Rather than make us believe that there’s a nice, simple recipe for leadership, McChrystal, Eggers and Mangone present us with the “myths” of leadership and the MUCH MESSIER “realities” of leadership.
After the profiles of the thirteen leaders, the authors present the three myths of leadership and their new definition of leadership. We end the book with the sober recognition of just how complex, dynamic and context-specific good leadership is.
It’s a challenging, important book that’s difficult to distill into a nice and tidy and practical 6-page Note but I’m excited to share some of my favorite Ideas as we all continue to step up into our own idiosyncratic expressions of Heroic leadership. So... Let’s get to work!
Download MP3
Download PDFAs we look at leaders, sometimes staring into the glare of greatness, and other times toward a darkened soul, we will see that image is rarely the reality, and that the myth is not the leader. They will often impress, and sometimes disappoint, but we hope they will always illuminate.
Get the BookLeaders are (and leadership is!) Complex
“For such successful founders there inevitably comes a stage of growth when the mountain of corporate decisions exceeds the number of minutes in a day. At this point, the creative and innovative genius must learn to rely upon others to sustain the vision, despite the founder’s natural and perhaps reasonable conclusion that his or her judgment is indispensable to the company’s success.
Disney and Chanel both wrestled with this ‘Founder’s Dilemma,’ and ultimately decided to spend the preponderance of their time and energy on making things, rather than managing a company. Walt delegated much of the day-to-day to his brother, Roy. Though she fought for control of her company during World War II, Chanel ultimately ceded her business to the Wertheimers. Such entrepreneurs are likely happier in a studio—or garage, workshop or lab—than a boardroom, just as our two founders were clearly focused on creative excellence above all else.
Disney’s most successful projects—Snow White and Disneyland, for example—featured Walt in the thick of things, micromanaging to the smallest detail. Chanel lived a glamorous life, but the flip side was bleeding fingers and long hours in her studio, where she is remembered as an imperious presence. In the end, each founder’s commitment to creative excellence meant that to work for Disney or Chanel was to have the chance to upend one’s industry and build something new and lasting: Day to day, the same energy that propelled each company’s creative excellence could be grating, confounding, and downright insulting.”
That’s from a chapter on the first pair whose leadership styles we study, The Founders: Walt Disney and Coco Chanel.
One of the principle themes of the book is that leadership is (and leaders are!) MUCH MORE COMPLEX than what we’re led to believe and what we want to believe. As I read the stories of the Founders, Geniuses, Zealots, Power Brokers, and Reformers, I was struck by the parallel wisdom of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s creative exemplars and Abraham Maslow’s self-actualizers.
In his GREAT (!) book, Creativity, Csikszentmihalyi profiles a broad range of creative human beings. He tells us that these Creators (with a capital C!) have widely different personalities.
As he puts it:“One can be creative by living like a monk, or by burning the candle at both ends. Michelangelo was not greatly fond of women, while Picasso couldn’t get enough of them. Both changed the domain of painting, even though their personalities had little in common.” And... He tells us that if we’re looking for ONE word to capture the essence of what makes them unique it would be: Complexity. Like the color white, creative individuals “tend to bring together the entire range of human possibilities within themselves.”
He tells us: “Are there then no traits that distinguish creative people? If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it would be complexity. By this I mean that they show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes—instead of being an ‘individual,’ each of them is a ‘multitude.’ Like the color white that includes all the hues of the spectrum, they tend to bring together the entire range of human possibilities within themselves.
These qualities are present in all of us, but usually we are trained to develop only one pole of the dialectic. We might grow up cultivating the aggressive, competitive side of our nature, and disdain or repress the nurturing, cooperative side. A creative individual is more likely to be both aggressive and cooperative, either at the same time or at different times, depending on the situation. Having a complex personality means being able to express the full range of traits that are potentially present in the human repertoire but usually atrophy because we think one or the other pole is ‘good,’ whereas the other extreme is ‘bad.’”
Abraham Maslow echoes this wisdom in his classic, Motivation and Personality. He identified nineteen characteristics of a self-actualizing individual. One of them is a “resolution of dichotomies.” As he puts it: “The dichotomy between selfishness and unselfishness disappears altogether in healthy people because in principle every act is both selfish and unselfish.”
The same complexity shows up with our other pairs. And... We’d be wise to consider embracing our OWN complexity as we create our idiosyncratic creative and leadership styles.
btw: Maslow ALSO points out another VERY important fact that is echoed throughout the book. The Myth is that our leaders are perfect. The Reality is there are NO perfect human beings.
This is always worth repeating: “There are no perfect human beings! Persons can be found who are good, very good indeed, in fact, great. There do in fact exist creators, seers, sages, saints, shakers, and movers...even if they are uncommon and do not come by the dozen. And yet these very same people can at times be boring, irritating, petulant, selfish, angry, or depressed. To avoid disillusionment with human nature, we must first give up our illusions about it.”
Most of the significant advances in the world have been made by people with at least a touch of irrational confidence in themselves.
Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.
The Heroes
“Her resolve to return South, and then do it again and again and again, set her apart. This choice—to return to the land of her bondage over and over and over—is what took her from being one of brave thousands who took their own liberty, to one of dozens, who once or twice returned south to help others to one of one—the Harriet Tubman we remember nearly two hundred years after her birth from going back south thirteen times rescuing around eighty slaves, giving advice to dozens more, and eventually strengthening the resolve of multitudes. …
Though ‘Slavery,’ as she once said, was ‘the next thing to hell,’ freedom did not mean happiness if it meant her family was still in bondage. ‘I was a stranger in a strange land; and my home, after all, was down in Maryland; because my father, my mother, my brothers, and sisters, and friends were there. But I was free, and they should be free,’ Tubman would say later in her life. Her sense of duty to her family was matched by her fierce belief that God would always protect and guide her. When asked about her decisions to return south, Tubman always responded, ‘T’wasn’t me, ’twas de Lord! I always tole him, ‘I trust you. I don’t know where to go or what to do, but I expect you to lead me,’ an’ he always did.’”
That’s from a chapter on The Heroes in which we meet Harriet Tubman and Zheng He (pronounced “Jung Huh”), a fifteenth-century Chinese admiral.
As I read Tubman’s Heroic story, I was struck by the sense that she is the living embodiment of the boddhisattvic ideal. In Buddhism, the bodhisattva strives to reach their own enlightenment (or ultimate freedom from pain) not so he or she can go relax in bliss on a beach somewhere but so they can help OTHERS attain THEIR OWN sense of enlightened freedom.
Imagine a woman in slavery. She has the courage to escape. Then she goes back THIRTEEN times (goosebumps) to free her family and around eighty slaves while inspiring countless others in the process. She became one of one.
Note: We celebrate Tubman as a Heroic leader not just for the *results* she created (which, although significant for those she saved, were only a fraction of a percent of the total rescued) but ALSO for the fact that she was a SYMBOL of heroism—she inspired all of us by her radiant example. This subtle but important distinction is a theme McChrystal comes back to often.
Deepak Chopra wrote a great little book called The 7 Spiritual Laws of Success. Then he wrote another great little book with his son, Gotham, called The 7 Spiritual Laws of Superheroes.
He tells us: “Buddha, or ‘the enlightened one,’ as he was known at this stage of his life to his disciples, proposed that there was a step more evolved than even enlightenment, or personal release from suffering. It was to share with others the wisdom gained and the experience of higher guidance, and in doing so elevate them to the same stage. Compassion in action. Love as the ultimate superpower encoded in total self-knowing and self-awareness. Buddha called those who had evolved to this stage of sharing the ultimate truth bodhisattvas. It should be no surprise that the word bodhisattva translates as ‘heroic-minded one,’ or in common parlance ‘superhero.’”
As I read her story and commitment to duty, I also thought of Admiral William McRaven. In his great book The Hero Code, he talks about the ten core Heroic virtues: Courage. Humility. Sacrifice. Integrity. Compassion. Perseverance. Duty. Hope. Humor. Forgiveness.
He tells us:“The idea of duty is a simple one. We all have a job to do in life. Whether that job is serving customers in a restaurant, taking care of our family, teaching our children, policing our cities, caring for the ill and infirm, protecting our gate, following the military Code of Conduct, or leading the country, we must do our job to the best of our ability. We must do our job well, not because it serves our interest, but because it serves the interests of others. We do not live in this world alone. Duty is a recognition that you have a responsibility to your fellow man and woman. It is an unselfish act, whether great or small, that contributes to the welfare of humanity. That is what makes it so very powerful. If you want to be a hero, it’s easy. Just do your duty!”
Here’s to having the Love-powered Courage to do OUR Heroic duties.
And when our work is done, Our course on earth is run, May it be said, ‘Well done’ Be thou at peace.
You see, fellow-soldiers, that perseverance is more prevailing than violence; and many things which cannot be overcome when they are together, yield themselves up when taken little by little.
A human need for heroes
“When Hollywood screenwriter George Lucas was ten years old, he asked his mother, ‘If there is only one god, why are there so many religions?’ Earlier in the twentieth century, the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung asked a related question after observing that similar legends emerge independently across different cultures. His answer was the existence of an ‘archetype’ within human psychology, such that ‘myths are first and foremost psychic phenomena that reveal the nature of the soul.’
The person who connected Lucas’s question with Jung’s answer was Joseph Campbell, who in 1949 wrote The Hero with a Thousand Faces, an exploration of consistent story lines across the world’s various myths. Campbell, who was influenced by Jung, wrote that ‘the symbols of mythology are not manufactured. . . . . They are spontaneous productions of the psyche.’
What Campbell saw across the various myths of history was a similar pattern, which has been termed the ‘Hero’s Journey,’ built around what Campbell called the ‘Monomyth.’ George Lucas credited Campbell’s description of this narrative form as critical to the development of his Star Wars epic. By now, much of Hollywood has studied what Lucas learned from Campbell. Films that retell an epic story, such as Ben-Hur, or that follow the Hero’s Journey, such as The Lion King, are often among the most profitable.”
That’s from the final part of our chapter on “The Heroes.” Check out our Notes on Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces for more. (And, check out our other Notes on his work including Pathways to Bliss, The Power of Myth, andA Joseph Campbell Companion. And, of course, the documentary Finding Joe. And... Don’t forget our Notes on Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward and Donald Miller’s Hero on a Mission.)
For now, know that the reason those Heroic movies are so popular is because they tap into a UNIVERSAL, fundamental desire within ALL of us to step up and show up as the best, most Heroic versions of ourselves. Let’s do that. TODAY.
We need heroes because of the values they propagate, and their role as symbols of purpose and possibility. Decades after they’ve stopped living their epics, master storytellers like George Lucas and Plutarch will continue to use heroes to captivate audiences and communicate values.
Still, leading remained difficult, and it has never gotten easier. It helped somewhat to read history, to emulate successful role models, and to listen to the counsel of others. But the wisdom they provided and the solutions they offered never completely fit. Not once.
Redefining Leadership
“For starters, an improved definition of leadership should at least address our three myths about leadership and account for their corresponding realities:
Leadership is contextual and dynamic, and therefore needs to be constantly modulated, not boiled down to a formula.
Leadership is more an emergent property of a complex system with rich feedback, and less a one-directional process enacted by a leader.
The leader is vitally important to leadership, but not for the reasons we usually ascribe. It is often more about the symbolism, meaning, and future potential leaders hold for their system, and less about the results they produce.
If we are to circumscribe these three realities with a more accurate definition, we might say that leadership is a complex system of relationships between leaders and followers, in a particular context, that provides meaning to its members. Sometimes that meaning may take the form of driving and achieving results. Other times it will take the form of achieving some sense of understanding, or hope, or identity. But we miss part of what makes leadership powerful if we confine it to just one aspect or the other.”
That’s from the final chapter called “Redefining Leadership.” It comes right after the chapter in which they articulate “The Three Myths” of leadership: The “Formulaic Myth,” the “Attribution Myth,” and the “Results Myth.” Let’s take a quick look at each.
First, we have the “Formulaic Myth.” This myth“reflects our desire to tame leadership into a static checklist, notwithstanding the reality that leadership is intensely contextual and always dependent upon particular circumstances that change from moment to moment and from place to place.”
Leadership checklists are nice and warm and fuzzy but... There is NO PLAYBOOK for effective leadership. Good leadership is, the authors remind us incessantly throughout the book, INTENSELY contextual and ALWAYS (!) dependent upon particular circumstances that are always changing. The myth is that there’s a checklist we can memorize. The reality is there is not.
Second, we have what the authors call the “Attribution Myth.” This myth “misrepresents leadership as little more than a process directed by the leader and, in this view, outcomes attributable mostly to that leader.”
Again, leadership is, necessarily, part of a much more complex ecosystem than we usually recognize. When we fail to see this reality, we overstate the influence of leaders and see a cause and effect relationship that isn’t as strong as we may like to believe.
The third myth is the “Results Myth.” This myth captures “the falsehood that the objective results of the leader’s activity are more important than her words or style or appearance. The truth is that when we look closely, we see leadership as much in what our leaders symbolize as what they accomplish.”
Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable. . . . Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.
Mastering Leadership
“Eventually, years of seeking to master the techniques of effective leadership brought me to the realization that leadership is a constantly moving target. The solution that works perfectly one day can be miserably disappointing the next. It feels impossible and unfair that the right answer to a problem changes, but it does. It feels absurd that being a good leader is a journey, not a destination, but it is. ...
In the end, I came to an accommodation. I will never master leadership, and yet I will never cease the effort to do so. Faced with uncertainty and change, I will seek to adapt where I can, and endure when I can’t. Success, I’ve found, doesn’t always mean you got it right, and failure doesn’t mean you got it wrong.
In 1941, twenty-three-year-old Ted Williams dramatically ended the season by going 6 for 8 in a doubleheader to finish with a historic .406 batting average. Amazing, but I remind myself that his historic average still implied that he failed almost 60 percent of the times he strode to bat.
It is impossible to master the countless variables of leadership to guarantee a perfect result. Ultimately, the best you can do is increase the probability of success. Failure rides alongside, but success demands the risk. I found that being confident of my commitment, but humble about my ability to control the outcome, is the best I can do.
We choose to lead or decide not to. We often don’t control whether we succeed or fail, or whether we’re celebrated or excoriated for what we do. But we can control what we genuinely try to do, and perhaps that is how we should hope to be judged.”
Those are the final words of the book’s Epilogue.
As I read that passage, I thought of George Leonard and his wisdom on Mastery. As he says, “We fail to realize that mastery is not about perfection. It’s about a process, a journey. The master is the one who stays on the path day after day, year after year. The master is the one who is willing to try, and fail, and try again, for as long as he or she lives.”
I also thought of two of my Heroes on the walls surrounding me: Phil Stutz and John Wooden.
The way Phil frames it? We want to be ALL IN on our COMMITMENT. And, at the same time, NOT ATTACHED to the OUTCOME. Ultimately, we want to be most committed to the PROCESS of BEING COMMITTED. We show up and do our best. Day in and day out. THAT is success.
Which makes me think of John Wooden and his definition of success. He tells us that“Success is peace of mind that is the direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming. Furthermore, only one person can ultimately judge the level of your success—you.”
Here’s to the humble, ALL IN pursuit of mastery in our lives as we strive to do our best in service to something bigger than ourselves, Hero!
All of this means that leadership is far more difficult than we realize, and that leaders must become more clear-eyed to the burden they’ve inherited. Leadership is not glamorous or straightforward. It is painful and perplexing, even at its best. Therefore, it is also not for everyone.
About the authors
Jeff Eggers
