Thoughts on Leadership - Essay (2012)

I have always been a follower. The leadership positions I have held resulted from no one else stepping forward or dread over the position being filled by someone I believe unsuitable. Furthermore I have no grasp of leadership as a concept and am reduced to imagining it's various arenas.

In military matters I was most impressed by Robert Graves' fifth hand account of Caesar chomping a radish while addressing the legions, and, Peter Hopkirk's construction of a night long retreat through oriental canyons, snows, and duplicity.

In business affairs my former boss possesses the skills I most envy. A white honky raised in the nexus of English rhetoric and sinocratic inscrutability, I sat listening to his soothingly excellent explanations spellbound; pissed.

In our current political situation: Cain represents the energy of a sea's worth of nodding heads, Santorum the levers of power afforded those clothed in purity and conflict, and in Gingrich the weakness of ideas whose originator's soundness is in question.

Absent from most of my impressions are women in leadership roles. To me, what it is to take charge and hold power among that sex is a mystery.

by Clifton Barnhart