by Andrew Leigh, Featured Contributor
What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.”
– Samuel Johnson
SAMUEL JOHNSON knew a thing or two about writing, having slaved away on his dictionary for ten years and further years annotating all of Shakespeare.
You’d have thought the writing scene in the 18th Century was rather different, and of course technologically at least it was.
Yet it was also a time of intense competition. Writers everywhere struggled to make any kind of impact; most could not earn a living at it. Sounds familiar?
The internet has made it even harder to gain any kind of financial reward for writing and presumably Johnson’s view that “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money” must be consigned to the history books, though perhaps with the added correction of “no man or woman”.
When it comes to leadership it used to be said there is something about this published in the world every five minutes or so. Today, it’s probably closer to every five seconds—and it shows.
One of the worse scenes is the countless blogs about leadership, where it seems just about anyone can ramble on about this topic, pose a pseudo question of apparent importance, and thereby hope to sound thoughtful or wise.
Most of the writing on leadership in these numerous blogs is notoriously weak in several specific ways.
First, there is seldom anything new, creative, or indeed highly stimulating about the leadership contributions. Most are almost absurdly pedestrian. Worse, so many seem thrown together without the due writing “effort” to which Johnson refers.
Instead, there’s a vast outpouring of “this is what I think”, rather than the more useful “this is what I have found from my research, or my actual experience.”
Secondly, few contributors appear to have actually read much about leadership. So for example we have blogs on “how to make decisions” which after reading turn out to add absolutely nothing to our knowledge of this complex issue.
But then as Johnson remarked, people have “a great aversion to intellectual labour.”
Most puzzling of all, why do so many writers on leadership blogs feel free to pontificate about it without presenting any solid evidence to support their assertions?
Such blogs are filled with righteous urgings for leaders to “do this” and “do that”, as if your average real life leader in an actual job would ever take a blind bit of notice about such juvenilia.
Finally, few such “experts” on leadership appear to have been leaders of any kind themselves. Is it so unreasonable to expect someone offering pearls of wisdom about leadership to have done the job at some stage?
The so-called “War for Talent” has particular relevance when it comes to leadership experts. Given what a tough job being a leader is these days, you might imagine we are facing a severe shortfall of such talent. Not a bit of it. We’re drowning in self-proclaimed experts on this topic all of whom of course write some kind of blog.
Ten ways to be a better leader may look neat on paper or screen, but in practice turn out to fall somewhere on the spectrum ranging from superficial to unoriginal.
In Johnson’s time you published at your peril. If what you wrote was any good you could be sure within a few days to suffer half a dozen rip offs. And having put your head above the parapet you could expect a public response ranging from complete silence to vicious comebacks about the worth of your contribution.
Sounds familiar again? Today’s blogs about leadership get similar treatment but on a global scale. Depending on the question you raise or the topic you espouse, apart from being totally ignored, which in many cases is definitely a good thing, what usually follows is a further outpouring of mainly spurious comments and opinions.
These differ from Johnson’s day in the degree of respect and politeness about the contributions which neither he nor the average 18th Century writer would have expected. Indeed the downside of the present political correctness about responses to blogs on leadership is you seldom read one such as “This an absolute load of cr*p”, or “”Nothing new here”, or “What do you base these puerile assertions on?”
Perhaps it’s just as well. Johnson himself suffered from some severe criticism which was personally extremely painful.
Having laboured for years at his annotated Shakespeare, within a few months after a triumphant publication, Macaulay a leading critic, publicly dismissed the entire enterprise as unacceptably shoddy: “it would be difficult to name a more slovenly, a more worthless edition of any great classic.”
What might the demanding Macaulay have made of the leadership blogs filling today’s cyber space? Not much, though he and Johnson would probably have agreed that in the case of the modern leadership blog, less is most definitely more.
Andrew Leigh is joint author of several books on leadership, including Ethical Leadership, Leading the Way, and Leading Your Team.
