Leaders Aren't Hoop-Jumpers

The American Scholar has published a speech that William Deresiewicz gave last year at West Point. Entitled "Solitude and Leadership", it has some observations about leadership that are similar to those made by the Hopper brothers in "The Puritan Gift."

I especially liked the following:

• An observation about kids at Yale...seems like this is the implicit goal of all large Western organizations these days...the creation of "excellent sheep."
  
  So what I saw around me were great kids who had been trained to be world-class hoop jumpers. Any goal you set them, they could achieve. Any test you gave them, they could pass with flying colors. They were, as one of them put it herself, “excellent sheep.”
• A comparison of Marlow's description of the Central Station manager in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" with the stereotypical hoop-jumping bureaucrat:
  About the 10th time I read that passage, I realized it was a perfect description of the kind of person who tends to prosper in the bureaucratic environment. ..... it was a perfect description of the head of the bureaucracy that I was part of, the chairman of my academic department—who had that exact same smile, like a shark, and that exact same ability to make you uneasy, like you were doing something wrong, only she wasn’t ever going to tell you what. Like the manager ...... the head of my department had no genius for organizing or initiative or even order, no particular learning or intelligence, no distinguishing characteristics at all. Just the ability to keep the routine going ...
• On leadership:
  ...... for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re worth doing in the first place. What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of exper­tise. What we don’t have are leaders. What we don’t have, in other words, are thinkers. People who can think for themselves. People who can formulate a new direction: for the country, for a corporation or a college, for the Army—a new way of doing things, a new way of looking at things. People, in other words, with vision.
• On multitasking:
  Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube.

I'm a little uneasy about some of the fuzziness in the author's description of solitude...nothing in, nothing out. But, I completely agree that we need time for things to soak in and we need to periodically take some serious time out to consider ideas that have been percolating.

Bill Gates' annual retreat is a bit too structured for me, but anyone who's serious about ideas has to occasionally spend a significant amount of time slowly chewing on core aspects of fundamentals (e.g., assumptions, constraints, coupling, connections, etc) of what matters most.

Nick Carr's upcoming book "The Shallows" looks to be an interesting look at how IT is "making us dumber."