Learning to create dreams

When I tell people that I study Management and Leadership, or managing and leading people, they ask me about the difference between the two. Such questions have recently reminded me of a Saint Exupery quote from his Citadel: “Instead of leading, you officiate; you are just dull witnesses.” Simply put, as a pseudo-IT guy, I can see that management of the future will be provided by information technologies, and even monkeys will be able to read the results from charts. By contrast, leading people, creating dreams worthy of following, has future, as well as the present and the past. The past – the history of leading people – often shows us that mankind would be better off if some people didn’t become leaders; should anyone be uncertain about what I mean, take Adolf Hitler as an example. A description of several of my subjects in my second semester may help to illustrate the difference between leadership and management.

Management Information Systems was one of the interesting subjects, and it confirmed my opinion that management will be the domain of computers. Computers are faster and more precise than people when it comes to processing, analyzing and evaluating data. Other – and now more interesting – subjects were the Psychology of Leadership and Responsible Leadership. The first subject mentioned helped me to understand the basics of why people follow someone and why some people lead – whether or not with success. The topic is very broad and complex, as illustrated by the amount of technical studies and articles written on the subject. But the principle is simple – when leading people, a relationship forms between the one who leads and those who follow, and the relation must be fulfilled by humans – which a computer can never do as well (or as badly) as a human. But when managing people, a lot of figures and information come into existence and are evaluated, verified and then used for planning and organizing – and a computer can often do that much better than a human.

The other subject mentioned was very valuable for me as a person. The subject Responsible Leadership was taught so that we were asked to read one book every week and then discussed it at a seminar from moral viewpoints. If you read the chief works by Kant and Mill, and apply their moral theories in an analysis of the decisions made by leading characters in various works of literature, it will teach you to think completely differently. This subject confirmed my earlier conviction, that a good leader cannot be just born – simply, that saying “he’s a natural-born leader” about someone is rubbish. A good leader personality has to work their way up and have moral standards. You build your standards through living and learn them through contact with people. Computers leading people is an absurd notion exactly because of morality/humanity, and should such a time ever come, I hope not to live to see it. It would be like when Hitler was in power – pursuing the goal at all costs, without scruples or moral values.

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n conclusion, if you ask me what the difference between management and leadership is, my answer is simple: Computers can do management, but they never should do leadership (and I think they’ll never be able to, anyway).