On Leadership

I will admit to a blush of embarrassment at blogging about leadership; on no other topic have so many people expended so many words to say so little.

However, having attended a leadership development workshop recently, the group I was with came up with a compact definition of leadership that feels useful enough to share.

What is the purpose of leadership: to get people to do things that they otherwise would not

What do leaders do: they listen, speak and centre

In this context, “centre” has a specific meaning. It means the psyche is located at the centre of the body. A centred leader is calm and purposeful. Leaders don’t rage or panic, except intentionally.

What I like about this definition is that it is profoundly situational. Good leadership is defined almost entirely by context. I find this situational take on leadership a lot more useful than the definitions in the standard readings.

Consider this much quoted article by John Kotter, which makes a distinction between management and leadership: “management involves planning and budgeting, leadership involves setting direction”.

This is sometimes true. There are situations where the ship is running well, but doesn’t know where to go. In which case, it is important to choose a destination.

There are also many situations when the desired direction is bleeding obvious. The hard part is to actually get the ship to move in that direction. At times like this, the task of leadership is management. The truth is often closer to "amateurs talk strategy, real generals talk logistics".

Walking Lothlorien

Clumpy boots, hiking staff, Strider-style stubble
Limestone cliffs, dry stone walls, the tumult of tumbling water,
Trout hold still against the stream,
Spaniels splash right in;
Pentagenarians sandwich together,
Gates shut on grazing sheep.
Wooded slopes, sun spangled meadows, Numenorean ruins,
Ice cream in the parking lot,
Lothlorien;
Without the ring.



The change in the style of this blog, unfortunate or otherwise, was prompted by a hike along the river Wye in the Peak District



Down Monsal Dale, up Brushfield, past the Priestcliffe Lees, down to Litton Mill, through Miller Dale and Cressbrook, and back up to Monsal Head



Sunshine on the water...naw, John Denver doesn't fit the Tolkienian mood



Magic wrought by the Numenoreans, when Middle-Earth was still young



All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost…
Renewed shall be the sword that was broken,
The crownless shall again be king

Cherokee Medicine

"The Cherokee lands furnished herbs to treat every known illness – until the Europeans came". This claim is from a tourist brochure I came across in North Carolina, still home to the Cherokee Nation.

Herbs to treat every known illness? A strong claim by any standards. Yet I read that claim humbly, respectfully, sympathetically. It is an assertion of Cherokee pride, an assertion worth making after the horrors of native American history. Is there a crime even worse than genocide? The annihilation of an entire civilization?

That respectful, sympathetic moment stuck in memory when I realized that I would never extend the same courtsey to the other sort of Indians, Asian-Indians like myself. This, despite the many terrible things that have been done to us through history.

When a fellow Indian seriously claims that our ancient culture had herbs to treat every known illness (this happens astonishingly often), my irritated instinct is to refer him to Ben Goldacre's excellent book/ blog on Bad Science, and ask to see the data from randomized, double blind, placebo controlled clinical trials.

Why the difference?

I guess I just can't think about India as a Wounded Civilization any more.

Lord of the Rings. At the Racsos

This is to announce a special Racso award for the worst moments in the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy. Brought to you by Moonballs from Planet Earth. 

The nominees are: - Gandalf and Saruman. The fight in Orthanc, when the venerable wizards biffed each other's flowing robes and beards into a terrible tangle - 

The last homely house. Rivendell, with its kitschy soft-focus shots and air-brushed effects, looked like something from a Thomas Kinkade painting - 

The paths of the dead. The avalanche of skulls that nearly trapped Strider, Legolas and Gimli inside the Haunted Mountain. This could have been a solemn moment in an action-packed film - 

Arwen and Aragorn. The kiss on a bridge in Rivendell. Of course, it had to be in soft-focus. Why was this limp love-story promoted from the appendix to the main film? More screen time for Liv Tyler is not reason enough - 

Uruk Hai births. The slime-covered creatures emerging from the breeding pits under Orthanc. Some things are better imagined than seen, even in a film 

And the Racso goes to Gandalf and Saruman biffing it out in Orthanc. Thunderous applause. Nothing can beat Saruman and Gandalf twirling each other around Orthanc for sheer goofiness, especially in a film that clearly cares about production values.

Lord of the Rings. At the Oscars

This is to announce a special Oscar for the best moments in the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy. Brought to you by Moonballs from Planet Earth. The nominees are: - Minas Tirith. The seven-circled white city on a hill, topped with the Tower of Ecthilion glimmering like a spike of pearl and silver, whose fighting men wore breastplates wrought with the White Tree of Gondor - Lighting the beacons. The bonfire relay across the snowy mountain-tops that brought the Rohirrim thundering south to fight alongside Gondor - Edoras. The setting for Meduseld, hall of Theoden son of Thengel, Lord of the Mark of Rohan. "Before the mountains of the south: white tipped and streaked with black...a tumbled mountain-mass with one tall peak stood like a sentinel a lonely height...set upon a green terrace, there stands aloft a great hall of men. And it seems to my eyes that it is thatched with gold. The light of it shines far over this land..." - Faramir's charge on Osgiliath. The futile cavalry charge Faramir led on an occupied Osgiliath, while Pippin sang at Lord Denathor's sumptuous lunch - Escape from the mines of Moria. The vaulted, crumbling staircase through flaming nothingness that led the Fellowship to the Bridge of Khazad Dum, where Gandalf battled the Balrog And the Oscar goes to...Faramir's charge on Osgiliath. Thunderous applause. All the nominations, the value-add in going from the book to the movie, are about visualization. The film stayed faithful to Tolkien's words, and yet visualized these scenes with a vividness and beauty that is far beyond my own imagination, even as a committed Tolkien fan. The unsung heroes of the film are probably Alan Lee and John Howe, two artists who have been visualizing scenes from Tolkien for decades, long before this film was even conceived. Peter Jackson had the good sense to collaborate with these outstanding old pros. Faramir's charge on Osgiliath wins the Oscar for being more than visualization. This scene is implied rather than described in the book. The movie takes this raw material, and builds it up into an emotional crescendo so intense that I almost dare not imagine it. By rights, it should have crumbled under its own weight. And yet, it works. Well done. Thanks PJ. Blog readers and Tolkien fans, please do chip in with your own Oscar nominees.

Lord of the Rings. On film?

I recently re-watched the Lord of the Rings Trilogy on DVD, and thoroughly enjoyed the spectacle, all nine hours of it. Yet I came away with a nagging sense that something was missing. And having mulled it over, here is my take.

Superficially, the Lord of the Rings is about Frodo’s hero-quest to destroy the ring of power. At this level, Frodo’s quest is no more or less compelling than that of Luke Skywalker, Clark Kent, Eragon, Zorro, Captain Kirk or Harry Potter. What makes Lord of the Rings special is the richness, the detail, the layered folk lore and the resonances of the vast Middle Earth within which Tolkien sets Frodo’s hero-quest.

Clearly the hero-quest matters. Anyone who ever picked up the Silmarillion was already a Tolkien fan. But what differentiates Tolkien from mere mortals is the texture and the staggering scale of the Middle Earth he imagined.

When the book was translated into the movie the balance shifted away from the folk lore and resonances of Middle Earth, towards the driving action of Frodo’s hero-quest. Film, even nine hours of film, doesn’t have much room for discursive reflection. Something was necessarily lost.

Some of this loss is obvious. Parts of the book have just been edited out. Leaving out Tom Bombadil and his wife Goldberry, daughter of the river Withywindle, was sacrilege to many old-time Tolkien fans. There is no room either for Radagast the Brown, the wizard steeped in the lore of wild animals, or for Gil Galad the elven king, of whom the harpers sadly sing. One would never know from the movie that Pippin’s Took clan had a reputation unusual behaviour, perhaps because a Took ancestor may have married a fairy. When Sam sees an oliphaunt, he has no time to put his hands behind his back and “speak poetry”, to trot out the fireside rhyme about oliphaunts he learnt back in the Shire.

A more subtle loss also runs through passages that were amplified in the movie.

Consider Anduril, Aragon’s sword. The sword is a big part of the movie. It is shown in the first scene, slicing the ring of Sauron’s hand. The movie introduces new scenes starring Anduril, like when Arwen and Aragon share a special moment over the broken blade, and when Elrond presents Aragon with the re-forged sword on the eve of battle (Aragon leaves Rivendell carrying Anduril in the book). Yet, the meaning of Anduril is overwhelmed by the urgency and tumult of war all around; the sword remains just a weapon.

Reading the book, I had time for my own imagination to work on Anduril, to transform Anduril from a weapon into a talisman. I knew that Boromir had come to Rivendell because he heard a voice saying:

Seek for the sword that was broken
In Imladris it lies…
For Isildur’s bane shall waken
And the Halfling forth shall stand.

I could let the rhythms of Bilbo’s little poem to Aragon ring in my ears:

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost…
Renewed shall be the sword that was broken,
The crownless shall again be king.

I had time to understand that Aragon is Elendil’s heir because he is the man who wields Elendil’s sword. A great sword forged by elvensmiths can’t be handled by just anybody. The sword chooses its wielder, and in so doing, defines the wielder’s destiny. I simply wouldn’t have understood that if I had watched the movie first.



That said, if something was lost, something was also created. There were scenes in the movie which were way more powerful than anything I’d imagined before. More about that in my next post.

Looking back, I am very fortunate to have experienced Lord of the Rings in three different mediums, in the right sequence. First, as a story told by a favourite aunt to the children in the family, second, as a summer holidays’ reading along with my cousins (competitively exchanging cool Tolkien trivia), third, as a big-budget film.

The only other works I’ve experienced in roughly the same media, in the same sequence, are the great Indian epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Am I comparing Peter Jackson to Peter Brook? Or to Ramanand Sagar?