December 18, 2010
Leadership: What Is It and How to Deal with It? [Part Two]
Section: WRITINGS | 101 reads
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DEADWOOD LEADERSHIP: DAQYANOOS MODEL
Or maybe,
The leadership is none of the above.
It is neither patently stupid, nor outright corrupt.
Nor is it really scared and weak-willed.
On the other hand,
It simply lacks vision, imagination and originality.
It shuns and abhors innovation and creativity.
It is incapable of burying the past.
Of reading, interpreting and coping with and enlivening the present.
And of anticipating and preparing for the future.
It is leaden-footed, stiff-jointed, hide-bound.
It is mundane, prosaic, flavorless.
It is mediocre, pedestrian, pedantic, predictable.
It is all analysis and no insight or intuition.
It is all rules, regulations and bureaucratic tangle and no spirit, vitality, resilience or imagination.
It is inflexible.
Unyielding.
Unaccommodating.
It is incapable of breaking out of the old routine.
Of the beaten path.
The bureaucratic mold.
The strait-jacket.
The rigid mindset.
The prison-house of the past.
The blinkers and blinders of the present.
And the power and predicament of its outdated ideologies, paradigms and modus operandi.
Such leadership attaches too much importance to rigid, lifeless, arid and often meaningless, static and even counterproductive conformity and continuity.
It prefers form over substance.
Appearance over meaning.
Ritual over reality.
It has a closed focus.
A narrow mind.
Constricted horizons.
Often, the main concern of this type of leadership is with “maintaining the status quo.”
With “playing by the rules.”
With “being a team player.”
With “not rocking the boat.”
With “not creating trouble.”
With “not causing ripples.”
With “not deviating from the group, the party or the organization line.”
With “discipline and conformity.”
With “patience and caution.”
With “forms and formulas.”
With “etiquette and protocol.”
With “formalities and procedures.”
With creating change, in every case and situation, from within, rather than from without.
At bottom, such leadership abhors and fears change, growth, innovation, expansion, movement, growth.
At best, it merely pays lip service to them.
In all cases, it is abysmally, eternally and irrevocably minimalist and gradualist.
It works at the pace of a snail moving in a circle.
Its pace of progress is glacial at best.
Such leadership at bottom lacks intelligence and smartness.
Courage and confidence.
It is, in this sense, really naive, stupid and short-sighted, even though its level and type of naiveté and stupidity are more rigid and rock-bound than the category of leadership specified earlier.
It, thus, must be considered to constitute a new and separate dimension of leadership.
And yet.
Like all the other models considered above, this particular form of leadership is also quite detrimental to the interests of the group, the organization, the community, the nation or the people it purports to represent, serve and lead.
That is because this leadership defies reality.
Runs counter to the rhythm and flow of nature.
Reality is dynamic, while this leadership is static.
Reality is in perpetual motion, change and growth, but this leadership is petrified and fossilized.
Reality is a process, for nothing in nature stands still or remains the same forever. Yet, this leadership remains transfixed in the rocky roots of its past.
Reality is a perpetual whirl of action. Yet, this leadership is the soul of indolence and inaction.
It is often little more than a lifeless byproduct of its past.
Often out of step with and irrelevant to the times and circumstances in which it lives and operates.
It is a crumb from the table of times and things gone by.
Deep down, it yearns and hankers after the security of the past, not realizing that all life is lived in the present.
And in the future.
And never in the past.
And without realizing that life, while it lasts, is characterized as much by, what appears to the unbelieving human eye, happenstance, entropy and hazard as by security, stability, redundancy and predictability.
At all times and in all places.
For, that is the nature of life.
And of reality.
Except that the nature of those hazards and uncertainties may differ from time to time, from place to place.
This leadership romanticizes the past and seeks to recreate its glitz, without realizing that romance and glitz are often attributes of pastness itself and not of any past in particular.
That they are as much a product of the human mind as of the external reality.
Rather than dream and work to fill its present and its future with the romance which it idolizes and craves.
Rather than work to make the dawn of every new day better, more glorious and more exciting than the preceding day.
This leadership awaits the return of its dead heroes, rather than make heroes of the living sons and daughters of its own followers.
Without realizing that the dead never return.
That the dead played their innings when they lived, and retired.
That they shaped and sculpted the world in which they lived, and left it behind for others to work on and improve.
That they fought their own battles of life, some of which they won, and some of which they lost.
And they marched on.
Never to return.
As they were supposed to do.
As it was meant to be.
As is the wont and custom of all life.
To march on and never to return.
This leadership does not realize that it is now up to the living to shape the present.
And the future.
To sculpt and contour a new world of here and now.
Nothing in nature stands still or remains the same for ever, yet this leadership remains transfixed in the rocky roots of its past.
This leadership drives without looking at the road.
But rather, and often, with its eyes glued to the map, instead of the road.
It navigates the treacherous superhighways of life with its eyes fixed on the rearview mirror.
The unchanging law of nature is flux, change, renovation, rejuvenation, while the invariant custom, culture, mindset and attitude of this leadership are ossified and atrophy-prone.
While the world moves, changes, evolves, grows, fructifies, multiplies, flourishes and constantly rediscovers and reinvents itself, this leadership stands still and watches the world go by.
It merely stands and stares as life and opportunities flow past at dizzying pace.
Or reacts forever to what others do.
Or say.
In the game of life, it is always caught playing catch-up, come-from-behind, in a reactive mode and posture.
It lives life by proxy and locks its followers in a life of subordination and bondage to others.
Others who are smarter, more resilient, more full of enterprise, imagination and creativity.
This type, style, approach, philosophy or model of leadership is nothing but a heap of deadwood and decaying past.
A clutter on the dull and distant margins of time.
A splash of foam floating on the crest of the gushing, churning tide of life.
Sans purpose, sans direction, sans future.
Let us call it the Deadwood Model of leadership.
The Daqyanoos Model of leadership.
This type of leadership is nothing but Ghutha’ ka Ghutha Issail, as Prophet Muhammad, Sallallahu Alaihi wa Sallam, once put it – froth whipped up by the churning, rushing waters of a flood.
END OF LEADERSHIP PART TWO
© 2003 Syed Husain Pasha
Dr. Pasha is an educator and scholar of exceptional
talent, training and experience. He can be reached at DrSyedPasha [at]
AOL [dot] com or www.IslamicSolutions.com.
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