My site’s been down. So for the last couple of weeks I’ve been rendered mute. But no longer!
Logically, I should be posting about the presidential election which, for good reason, has Americans in a frenzy. However, precisely because of our fevered brow, it’s a good time to step back. To review a book about leadership written by the real thing – a leader.
———————————————————————–
It’s not often that a book about leadership is written by someone who really, really, really knows his stuff. This one then is an exception. Written by Tony Blair, Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland for ten years, the man is deeply experienced and unquestionably expert.
He does not disappoint. Blair’s book, On Leadership: Lessons for the 21st Century is not great. But in an area – leadership – in which excellence is in embarrassingly short supply his book stands out as solid.
The book is more relevant to leaders in government than in business. Moreover, while he tries to be current, Blair’s time as prime minister was 1997-2007. So, the context within which he governed was different from – it was far less fraught and furious – what it is today. To wit: Britain’s last prime minister, Rishi Sunak, lasted in office less than two years. And the incumbent, Keir Starmer, whose Labor Party won a landslide victory just last summer, already has approval ratings no better than dismal.
Blair’s model as a writer could have been Machiavelli. Not that Blair himself is Machiavellian. Rather it is that Blair, like his long-ago predecessor, set out to write a manual for leaders who are governors. Of the 40 short chapters many have titles indicating their instructions: “Be the Leader with the Plan;” and “Your First Duty: Keeping People Safe;” and “How to Negotiate.”
Ironically, the area in which Blair is the least competent is the one on which he spends the most time – technology. To his credit, he understands how technology has changed the dynamic between leaders and followers. In fact, there is a chapter on “Politics in the Era of Social Media” in which Blair acknowledges that “social media is a place where vitriol and venom are the sauce flavoring whatever opinion is being given vent to.” However, there was no social media during the decade that Blair was prime minister, which probably explains why in this area Blair seems more performative than highly knowledgeable.
Blair is at his best when he is most deeply human. First, when he is what he is at heart – an optimist during a time when pessimism about democracy prevails. Second, when he is being what he also is at heart – a seasoned wise man when wisdom about leadership is in equally short supply.
What I admire most about this book is that it does what it sets out to do. To instruct about leadership seriously and purposefully. My own book, Professionalizing Leadership, is a lament about how we treat leadership as an occupation. We do not regard it as a profession or even as a vocation. Blair seems to share this view. He writes that governing is the one area of importance “in which a person with no qualifications, no track record, a CV devoid of content, can rise to a position of extraordinary power. In any other walk of life, we would consider such a circumstance unthinkable, ridiculous even…. But in politics this can happen.”
It is this deficiency that Tony Blair sets out to address. Which is why anyone with a personal, professional, or political interest in how to lead during a time when leading in democracies is so difficult, will find Blair’s book instructive and, as important, heartening.