Intelligent Leadership

325 Pages·2002·2.86 MB·English

by  Alistair Mant

Alistair Mant was born and raised in Sydney. He attended Sydney Grammar School
and the University of Sydney, where he shone in Arts and failed abysmally in Law.
His educational breakthrough occurred on the Snowy Mountains Scheme, where he
started work at the age of nineteen as a ‘fitter’s assistant’. This was his first and
most important exposure to big, complicated and important systems. He worked also
as an account executive in advertising before the IBM Corporation transferred him
to Europe. Subsequently, he carried out research at the Tavistock Institute of Human
Relations and was elected Dean of Faculty at the South Bank University, also in
London.
Intelligent Leadership follows the critical acclaim of Leaders We Deserve, The
Rise and Fall of the British Manager and The Experienced Manager, for which he
was awarded the British Institute of Management’s Bowie Medal.
Alistair divides most of his time between Australia and Europe, helping public
and private organisations to develop strategies which are people-friendly and
therefore likely to work in practice. His wife is a developmental psychologist and his
daughters are, respectively, a musician/musicologist and a theatre director.
ii
For my father
Gilbert Mant 1902–1997
INTELLIGENT
LEADERSHIP
ALISTAIR MANT

ALLEN & UNWIN
iv
Copyright © Alistair Mant 1997

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval
system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

First published in 1997
This edition 1999
Allen & Unwin
9 Atchison Street
St Leonards NSW 1590
Australia
Phone: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
E-mail: [email protected]
Web: http://www.allen-unwin.com.au

National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Mant, Alistair.
Intelligent leadership.

2nd ed.
Bibliography.
Includes index.
ISBN 1 86508 052 7.

1. Leadership. 2. Leadership—Case studies. 3. Organizational change. I. Title.

658.4

Digital processing by The Electric Book Company, London, UK, www.elecbook.com

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents

PREFACE VII
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 1
INTRODUCTION 1
PART I INTELLIGENT LEADERSHIP: NO OXYMORON 19
REDEFINING LEADERSHIP 22
REDEFINING INTELLIGENCE 39
THE FROG AND THE BICYCLE: LOOKING AT SYSTEMS 51
PART II A GALLERY OF INTELLIGENT LEADERS 63
SIR WILLIAM HUDSON: AN IDEAL ROLE MODEL 70
MARY PARKER FOLLETT: A (NEARLY) LOST LEADER 92
THE INTELLIGENT LEADER’S QUALITIES 100
BOB CLIFFORD: THE INGENIOUS ‘DUNCE’ 132
ROBERT KEEP: FROM SPY TO GURU 146
ALLAN COMAN: AN EDUCATOR OF GENIUS 157
JOHN LATHAM OF IBM: THE HOUSETRAINED ‘IMO’ 182
BOYS, GIRLS, ROLE MODELS AND PARENTING 197
LIZ O’SHAUGHNESSY AND NOEL WAITE: RELATIONSHIP
BUSINESSES AND THE 21ST CENTURY 210
WEAVING THE THREADS 235
PART III NURTURING INTELLIGENT LEADERSHIP 251
HELPFUL HINTS ON ORGANISATIONAL LEADERSHIP 262
POSTSCRIPT 301
BIBLIOGRAPHY 303
INDEX 307
Preface

This book is primarily about intelligence—not the sort of ‘intelligence’ measured by
IQ tests or formal examinations, but the kind of practical intelligence which creates
opportunities and steers around potential cockups and blunders. The presumption of
the book is that all of us are grateful for leadership which is possessed of useful
intelligence. Leaders have to do many things but if they are stupid, we are sunk.
It is hard to see how to write about practical cleverness without discussing its
obverse—operational stupidity. The problem with this is that most of us are very
sensitive about the subject of stupidity, I think because most of us have been made
to feel personally stupid at some time in our lives by parents, siblings, teachers,
officials and bosses. This is the moment to assert that I am not trying to be clever or
superior about this. I have to deal with the subject, but the focus is always on
systemic stupidity—the way that otherwise smart people can be rendered apparently
stupid by dysfunctional or amoral systems. Of course, those responsible for such
systems are not, collectively, exactly brilliant.
Every single human being possesses some kind of cleverness or other but we
delude ourselves if we assume that we are all equal in this respect. Leaders of great
enterprises, and that goes for countries like Australia too, need to be highly
Intelligent Leadership viii
intelligent. The book assumes that we all need to be clearer about what kinds of
intelligences (plural) they need.
The year of publication, 1997, happens to include two highly significant fiftieth
anniversaries for me and for the book’s contents. The first of these is the fiftieth
birthday of the Snowy Mountains Scheme, where I worked for a while in a very
lowly manual role in 1958–59. This book is not an autobiography but I can say that
my involvement in that great national enterprise set me firmly on the path to
understanding the special demands of leadership in Australia. I live overseas these
days and this is the first book I have written initially for an Australian audience. My
other writings have migrated to Australia from Europe; this book is designed as an
Australian export, after suitable improvements have been made by those who love
and/or hate what it has to say. Sir William Hudson, the first Commissioner of the
Snowy Scheme is my first example of intelligent leadership.
The other fiftieth birthday is that of the Tavistock Institute in London, where I
worked for some years, in a slightly less lowly role, in the 1970s. The Tavistock was
the outgrowth of the extraordinary ingenuity stimulated by the Second World War.
Great emergencies sometimes unleash great creativity. ‘Socio-technical systems’
theory—one of the ‘Tavi’s’ main exports—represented a revolutionary way of
connecting technical and operational systems with human nature. The problems the
Institute addressed are perennial—each new generation of leaders has to learn how
to make organisations purposeful and congenial for people.
Accordingly, there are numerous references in these pages to the great names at
the Tavistock, some of them now dead of course—Wilfred Bion (on the
psychodynamics of groups), Ken Rice, Harold Bridger and Eric Miller (on
experiential leadership learning), Elliott Jaques (on stratified systems theory and the
time-span of discretion) and perhaps most significant of all, Eric Trist and Fred
Emery (on socio-technical systems theory). The glory days of the Tavistock as an
organisation are long past but we forget the lessons at our peril. (Fred Emery died in
April 1997 but his wife Merrelyn, from a Canberra base, continues to address the big
questions concerning representative, participative democracy.)
The two fiftieth birthdays symbolise for me firstly the peculiar genius of
Preface ix
Australia and secondly those unchanging realities about the human condition which
every generation has to learn. Put the two together and you have a powerful engine
for change. I firmly believe that this country has unique assets which equip it for
world leadership in some arenas. The coming of the millennium, and the Olympics,
and the remaking of the Constitution all symbolise the opportunities to be seized.
But we could miss the chance if we fail to mobilise all the latent intelligence and the
leadership potential. This is a good time for the ‘clever country’ to re-examine the
kind of cleverness it needs.
Bryce Courtenay tells the apocryphal story of a conversation between President
Clinton and that great Australophile Edward de Bono. The President asks: ‘What
would be the elements of an ideal country in the twenty-first century?’ De Bono is
supposed to have replied: ‘Well—it would have to have a population of less than
twenty-five million people, it would have to use the English language, it would have
to be located on the Pacific rim, it would have to possess a well-entrenched
democracy, and it would have a strong tertiary education system. Oh—by the way—
it exists already—it’s called Australia!’

Alistair Mant
April 1997
Acknowledgments

There are far too many people to thank by name for my recent re-education in
Australian political and managerial life. They know who they are. Let me single out
my two daughters, Eleanor and Isabel, each of whom has travelled around Australia
with me recently and whose half-Australian insights, shaped by their mother’s keen
eye, have been extraordinarily helpful to me. I want to mention also my publisher
Joshua Dowse, a publisher who understands writers. I recommend this. I am also
grateful for the extended hospitality of the Maple-Brown family in Sydney and my
old friend Angela Nordlinger, in whose homes I have met an amazing array of
creative eccentrics, some of them installed in the book.
Charles Handy, the doyen of the management writers, advised on the text and
made one crucially important structural suggestion for which I am very grateful. My
old friend Alan Walker has done a superb job of indexing very complex material.
Finally, and most important, I am indebted to the outstanding Australian
entrepreneurs who have lent their personal and professional stories to this little
enterprise. They are, as they say, part of the solution rather than part of the problem.