1. Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't, Harper Busines, 2001

2. Warren Bennis, 'The future has no shelf life', in Warren Bennis, Gretchen M Spreitzer and Thomas G Cummings, editors, The future of leadership, Jossey-Bass, 2001

3. Karl E Weick, Sensemaking in Organizations, Sage, 1995

4. Howard Gardner, Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People's Minds, Harvard Business School Press, 2004

5. Karl E Weick, 'Leadership as the legitimation of doubt', Warren Bennis, Gretchen M Spreitzer and Thomas G Cummings, editors, The future of leadership, Jossey-Bass, 2001, page 97

6. Blair's speech at 10 Downing Street, 2 May 1997, and posted on www.cnn.com

7. Norman Fairclough, New Labour, New Language?, Routledge, 2000

Where have all the great leaders in design gone?

James Woudhuysen challenges the cynicism about leading designers, and argues design leadership is needed. The trend for celebrity 'Starchitects' is only the most pointed signal that the building sector would prefer anything rather than engage in real process innovations. And in this it merely reflects a prevailing culture throughout society.

Where have all the great leaders in design gone? There are some effete international architects, and one or two pompous international product designers, too; but designers of the stature of Raymond Loewy, Saul Bass, Paul Rand or George Nelson, or design managers like Peter Behrens, Frank Pick and Eliot Noyes - such giants are missing.

They had a vision of design as a force for progress. They felt a sense of responsibility to communicate. They refused to moan on about them not being appreciated enough by business or government.

Today, by contrast, much of mainstream management, let alone the world of design management, is swept by cynicism about what leadership can do.

In Europe, Shell chairman Sir Philip Watts overstated his company's reserves in Nigeria and had to resign. At Disney, underperforming chairman Michael Eisner lost his title. In Tokyo, losses at the carmaker Mitsubishi led to the departure of Rolf Eckrodt. WorldCom's Bernie Ebbers still faces trial. Closer to designland, Martha Stewart has fallen from grace.

Since Jim Collins inveighed against CEOs as superstars in his bestselling Good to Great (1), critics of Wall Street's führerprinzip have gone further than making cheap points about executive pay and executive corruption. We live, they insist, in an unknowable world of global outsourcing. Takeovers are on the rebound and employee 'churn' is a trend that has come to afflict top directors, too. So what price the omniscient, omnipotent corporate leader? (2)

Well: it's true that, when 'kicked upstairs', brilliant managers of design can become weak leaders of design. The rule doesn't always hold - some people can unite both management and leadership capabilities in design. But the rule often applies. On the other hand, today's fears about leadership are overdone.

Guru theorists of leadership fret about the demography and work-life balance of both leaders and led. They fear that successful young leaders have what leadership expert Warren Bennis calls affluenza - wealth but no meaning in their lives. Successful young leaders, Bennis observes, are prone to ask: 'Is this all there is?'. (2)

As for the older generation of leaders, their own kids are not alone in telling them to indulge in their emotions and in ethics. The same sermons are delivered by thousands of powerful coachers, authors and consultants in the human and environmental sides of corporate social responsibility (CSR).

In design, design management and elsewhere, the results of CSR for the arena of leadership are dire. Everywhere we find professionals beating their breasts about the fact that their design programmes are not therapeutic or naturalistic enough. In this sea of liberal relativism, where only big corporations and macho attitudes can be criticised, there is a remarkable commoditisation of thought. Everyone is very nice to each other in debate.

Few rigorous intellectual challenges are mounted, though there is plenty of plain gossip behind the scenes.

Today, mainstream corporate leadership buffs say it's more about sensemaking than decisionmaking; more about saying 'I don't know', to establish credibility, than about setting a clear direction. (3)

Worse still, derring-do leader 'narratives' are meant to inspire the troops. (4)

Indeed, animating people is regarded as an end in itself, regardless of what ideas you are trying to animate them about. Animating people, Karl Weick writes, '... is surprisingly indifferent to content. In a way, any old prescription, any old change program, any old mantra or guru or text will do, as long as that program animates people and gets them moving and generating experiments that uncover opportunities; provides a direction; encourages updating through improved situational awareness and closer attention to what is actually happening; and facilitates respectful interaction in which trust, trustworthiness and self-respect… develop equally and allow people to build a stable rendition of what they face' (5)

I don't buy all this.

The idea of leadership may sound a bit fascist, and we have all met leaders from The Office. But the concept of leadership pioneered by Tony Blair in the speech he made after being elected in 1997 - that politics should be about the service of the public - seems to me an abdication of responsibility. (6 and 7)

Design managers might find it fashionable to prostrate themselves, in the modern egalitarian style, in front of an oh-so-playfully-creative, participative, empowered and personally autonomous workforce.

They may dupe themselves that everyone can be a leader.

But the true design leader will be remembered for the progress won, the new businesses established, and for the insights developed, tested in action, and communicated in unambiguous words, numbers, graphics and presentations.

Any other concept of leadership is just fluff. James Woudhuysen 17 August 2004

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