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What Makes a Great Leader?

By Eddie Prentice

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"Management is about manipulating resources to get a known job done. Leadership is about creating change that you believe in." (Seth Godin)

In "Tribes" Godin writes about leaders and their tribes, and makes the claim that strong leaders empower their tribes, offering them all equal opportunity to lead. They're charismatic, communicative, inclusive and generous.

It turns out, what we look for in our leaders today isn't very different from what people looked for forty years ago, nor from what they looked for in prehistoric times. In July 1974, Time magazine interviewed a series of philosophers, writers, and historians and asked them what and who they thought made great leaders. Here's what some of them said.

"In Aristotelian terms, the good leader must have ethos, pathos and logos. The ethos is his moral character, the source of his ability to persuade. The pathos is his ability to touch feelings, to move people emotionally. The logos is his ability to give solid reasons for an action, to move people intellectually." MORTIMER ADLER, U.S. philosopher.

"Greatness has nothing to do with morality. A leader gets people to follow him. Napoleon led the French to catastrophe, but they followed him almost to the end." CORRELLI BARNETT, British military historian.

"No concept of leadership is complete without the element of zeal and fervor, an almost spiritual element. Martin Luther King had it, so did Gandhi and Nehru... the leader must have a belief in what he is doing, almost a singlemindedness." ALEXANDER HEARD, U.S. educator

"Leaders must fulfil three functions- provide for the well-being of the led, provide a social organization in which people feel relatively secure, and provide them with one set of beliefs." JULES MASSERMAN, U.S. philosopher.

"A great leader has original ideas and succeeds in having them accepted by millions or billions." JEAN-FRANCOIS REVEL, French author.

Interestingly, each of these quotes touches on a different aspect of leadership- original ideas, zeal and fervor, the ability to get people to follow, social consideration of the tribe, and morality. But the leaders named in these quotes are some of the most famous people in history, not you or me. Godin agrees with most of these principles of leadership, but he takes them one step further, by arguing that we can all be leaders. "Corporations are traditionally built around the CEO, with all his perks and power. The closer you get to being king/CEO, the more influence and power you have... Marketing changed everything. Marketing created leverage. Marketing certainly changed the status quo. Most of all, marketing freed and energized the tribe." (Godin, 13)

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