Leadership

http://lea.sagepub.com MBA and the Education of Leaders: The New Playing Fields of Eton?
Yiannis Gabriel Leadership 2005; 1; 147 DOI: 10.1177/1742715005051856 The online version of this article can be found at: http://lea.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/1/2/147

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MBA and the Education of Leaders: The New Playing Fields of Eton?
Yiannis Gabriel, Imperial College, London, UK

Abstract This article takes a critical look at the management education offered by business schools, seeking to establish whether it encourages the emergence and development of leadership qualities. The author introduces a teaching experiment he carried out as part of an MBA programme aimed at assessing whether it is possible to teach a leadership course in which the students do not assume the role of followers, but rather nd themselves leading others, taking responsibility and operating without the conventional safety net provided by the lecturer. The author concludes that the structure, ideology and ethos of MBA programmes are fundamentally opposed to an education of leaders, arguing MBA experience is one for educating followers rather than leaders committed followers, obstinate, hardened lieutenants perhaps, but not generals. It is in this sense then that MBAs may be seen as a contemporary parallel to the playing elds of Eton. They are uniquely suited to people who can survive and even prosper in the merciless elds of todays business. Keywords fantasy; followership; leadership creed; leadership laboratory; pedagogy

Introduction
The question of how to educate leaders is one that has long exercised the minds of philosophers, educationists and policy makers, as well as those of some leaders themselves. Plato and Aristotle had famous and not altogether successful attempts at educating leaders, notably Dionysus II of Syracuse and Alexander the Great of Macedonia. Machiavellis attempt to educate the younger Lorenzo de Medici also comes readily to mind. That curious British institution, the so called public school, evolved in the 18th and 19th centuries as the breeding ground for political and military leaders, the sort that were not too put out by the transition from the playing elds of Eton to the killing elds of Waterloo. Currently, the education of leaders preoccupies most of the worlds chief business schools; it is the object of innumerable executive development programmes; and it sustains armies of consultants, executive trainers and coaches. Among academics, there are ongoing and vigorous debates as to the scope, limits and effectiveness of different approaches to teaching leaders.
Copyright 2005 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Vol 1(2): 147163 DOI: 10.1177/1742715005051856 www.sagepublications.com
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This article takes a critical look at the management education offered by business schools, seeking to establish whether it encourages the emergence and development of leadership qualities. The argument builds on a teaching experiment I carried out as part of an MBA programme. This aimed at assessing whether it is possible to teach a leadership course in which the students do not assume the role of followers, but rather nd themselves leading others, taking responsibility and operating without the conventional safety net provided by the lecturer. In spite of different signs indicating that students had responded well to the experiment, my analysis suggests that the structure, ideology and ethos of MBA programmes are not immediately conducive to the education of leaders. Instead, I found that the MBA experience may be seen as one of educating followers rather than leaders. Debates on the education of leaders are parts of wider and robust debates on the nature of leaders and leadership. Numerous scholars on leadership have commented on the immense proliferation of publications and research in the area, along with the somewhat confusing and even chaotic nature of many current leadership debates (Bass & Seltzer, 1990; Bennis, 1989; Bryman, 1992; Burns, 1978; Chia and Morgan, 1996; Doh, 2003; Grint, 2000; Heifetz, 1994; Heifetz & Linsky, 2002; Kets de Vries, 1988; Maccoby, 1981; Selznick, 1957; Sims & Lorenzi, 1992; Yukl, 2002; Zaleznik, 1977). The casual follower of these debates may easily be forgiven for thinking that arguments in the area of leadership go round and round in circles assumptions are made, then challenged, then made again, opinions harden, then are challenged, then harden again. At various moments, particular ideas seem to offer radical breakthroughs, e.g. management and leadership are different, leadership is the management of meaning, leadership is a relationship and so forth, only for the old arguments to resurface again, virtually undistinguished from their earlier incarnations. Such a casual follower may end up despairing that we are forever doomed to periodic resurrections of traits theories, contingency theories and even, the now hopelessly and politically incorrectly named great man theories. One way of accounting for this messy situation is to view it as being what Kuhn (1962/1996) described as a pre-paradigmatic state of knowledge, i.e. the state of a discipline which has still not acquired a dominant paradigm, one whose concepts have not yet become sufciently precise. In such a discipline, many ideas compete for ascendancy, without any agreed criteria for judging them, without any agreed assumptions that can serve as starting points. Much of the dialogue during such a phase is, in fact, an attempt to dene schools rather than produce agreement (p. 48), with different scholars desperate to make themselves heard in a cacophony of opinion. All the same, this explanation does not seem very convincing. If anything, it may be argued that the eld of leadership suffers from too much agreement rather than disagreement. For example, in a recent article in the Academy of Management Learning and Education Journal, Doh (2003) reported conversations with six distinguished leadership academics. Far from widely diverging views, these scholars, representing some of the worlds leading business schools, appear collectively to offer a kind of orthodoxy or received wisdom, a credo of shared assumptions, opinions and beliefs. Leadership is universally seen as a very important phenomenon, capable of extraordinary results; leaders are seen as having certain innate qualities, even if some aspects of leadership may be developed or extended; the learning of

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leadership must be experiential rather than book based; and it is thought that corporate success is the product of effective leadership. To parody somewhat these core assumptions, one may venture that the Leadership Creed is made of the following items: 1. I believe in a God called leadership; 2. And this God is capable of everything; 3. And, I believe that people are born with different degrees of leadership, different innate abilities and dispositions; 4. But, all the same, many aspects of leadership can be learned; 5. And some can be taught; 6. And the best way of teaching leadership, always respecting different local traditions, is experiential; 7. And the teaching of leadership must be informed by ethics and morality; 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. In as much as they do not really interfere with the bottom line; And I believe that leadership can be taught in many places; Of which, the great business schools of the world are the greatest; And I believe that this God called leadership has various apostles on Earth; Of whom is the greatest.

At this point, a variety of names may be proffered, which may include Jack Welch, Nelson Mandela, Alexander the Great, or Shaka the Zulu. Far from a pre-paradigmatic jumble, then this credo represents a fairly broad common ground made up of assumptions, opinions and beliefs. From time to time, different voices may question one or other articles of the credo, but, on the whole, the credo persists. What is interesting about this state of affairs is that the existence of the creed, far from settling into Kuhnian normal science, bringing comfort, satisfaction and complacency, keeps generating dissatisfaction, frustration and discontent. A lasting sense that our leadership theories are not good enough, that our leadership education programmes are not effective enough and that our leadership research is not scientic enough persists and possibly increases with every new breakthrough and every new discovery. With every leadership secret that gets unlocked, it is as if a hundred new ones are created. It is not surprising then, that echoing Socrates, Keith Grint has said that once I knew a lot about leadership; since I started reading about it, I have started to know less and less. The more we read, the more we talk and the more we research leadership, the less many of us feel that we know about it. And the less we know, the more we seek comfort in the dogma of the creed, a dogma which far from answering our questions exacerbates our discomfort. What then do I hope to do in this article that does not merely add to the discomfort and dissatisfaction which, ultimately, reinforces the creed/paradigm? My aims here are relatively modest. I want to present the results of an experiment in the teaching of leadership that I undertook with my MBA students at Imperial College. The experiment was meant to test a particular approach to educating leaders. As such, I do not believe that it was especially successful. It was, however, quite revealing to me, throwing light on certain aspects of the leaderfollower relationship and also on

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the ethos of the MBA, which I came to view as, at core, antithetical to educating students in leadership. The specic point of the experiment was to test whether it is possible to educate leaders not by turning them into followers but by throwing them directly into the deep end of leading. This idea runs contrary to a large educational tradition which viewed obedience as the starting point of the education of future generations. The Spartan word for education of the young was agg, a term contrasted to the Athenian paideia. Whereas the Athenians sought through paideia to develop the individuals diverse and unique potential, including leadership potential, the Spartan agg was much more directly aimed at discipline and obedience. Deriving from the Greek word for leading, agg aimed at inculcating in the Spartan citizen the idea that, throughout life, individuals must be subordinated to the requirements of state (something that applied even to the two Spartan kings). The core principle behind agg is well captured by the Jesuit, Herr Naphta in Thomas Manns (1924/1960) The Magic Mountain: All educational organizations worthy of the name have always recognized what must be the ultimate and signicant principle of pedagogy: namely the absolute mandate, the iron bond, discipline, sacrice, the renunciation of the ego, the curbing of personality, And lastly, it is an unloving miscomprehension of youth to believe that it nds pleasure in freedom: its deepest pleasure lies in obedience. (p. 400) This principle of education based on obedience has found numerous and diverse applications, from British public schools to the Hitler Youth Movement in all of these, the principle is the same: in order to lead, a man (and to a far lesser extent a woman) must rst learn to obey (Grint, 2005; Knopp, 2002) as a member of a cohesive band of followers. According to Hoskin and Macve (1988), this principle was exported from the US Military Academy at West Point initially to the management of US armories and the railroads and subsequently to the kinds of disciplinary controls associated with Taylors scientic management. There are many circumstances in which the unquestioned obedience fostered by disciplined schooling acts as an effective basis for a system of social and management controls. Since the pioneering work of Bernstein (1975), Bowles and Gintis (1976; 1986), Willis (1979) and others, there is a large body of literature suggesting that school discipline becomes the basis of subsequent work discipline; it also becomes the linchpin for legitimizing social, economic and political inequalities, since success at school (and, relatedly, compliance with school discipline) is seen as the basis of future success in career and life. Obedience can also be the basis of a gendered (and overwhelmingly masculine) psychological contract, whereby obedient followers are guaranteed, if not success in life, at least protection, brotherhood and lite status. But as the basis for educating leaders, obedience has been questioned. One particularly convincing critique is that when it does not produce quiescent acolytes, it produces authoritarian leaders who expect unquestioned loyalty, are rigid and stereotypical in their thinking, are unable to tolerate disagreement and display a variety of dysfunctional personal qualities. Dixon (1976), for example, blames the public schools for the military disasters of World War I and for the disastrous appeasement policy of the 1930s (p. 289; Wilkinson, 1964). Along

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similar lines, Mant (1977) argued that the authoritarianism and dependence bred by the British public school ethos are a primary factor behind the declining fortunes of British industry following World War II, and the fall of the British manager from grace in the 1960s and early 1970s. In the light of a more egalitarian and competitively individualistic ethos, it may not be surprising, as McCulloch (1991) has argued, that education for leadership has fallen from grace in the second half of the 20th century. Even assuming that authoritarian leaders (and the unquestioned discipline that they demand) can be effective in leading certain types of states or organizations in certain types of situations, it is doubtful that they are suitable to lead most of todays Western organizations. As various authors have argued (Bennis, 1989; Hirschhorn, 1988; Krantz, 1990; Maccoby, 2000; Sennett, 1998), blind obedience is neither possible nor desirable for most of todays organizations. Instead, creative imagination, exible thinking, and persuasive communication are far more important qualities in todays leaders. Such qualities represent the very opposite of authoritarian personalities and are commonly identied with narcissistic ones (Bennis, 1989; Brown, 1997; Gabriel, 1999; Krantz, 1990; Maccoby, 1976; 2000; Oglensky, 1995). Narcissism, as a complex of desires for status, esteem, admiration and prestige, can be part of any leaders psychological make up, including that of authoritarian ones. Authoritarian leaders, as epitomized by many of Hitlers henchmen, can display powerful narcissistic leanings, including a fascination with uniforms, grandiose buildings and architecture, mass public displays of devotion and emotion and so forth. Yet, in talking about narcissistic leaders, we are referring to leaders whose entire outlook and mental functioning is dominated by narcissism. Such leaders have a unique ability to attract followers by communicating effectively, inspiring them with visionary ideas and lling them with self-condence and self-esteem. They manage to make themselves the centre of attention craving admiration and adulation, and at the same time have the ability of animating others. In contradistinction to authoritarian leaders who generally are starved of love in their childhood and adolescence (something exacerbated by the public school ethos), narcissistic leaders tend to have had pampered childhoods, often as only children where they could command the doting attention of parents. Unlike authoritarian leaders who have nothing but scorn for love, eccentricity, difference and fantasy, narcissistic leaders tend to overvalue these. Narcissistic leaders are themselves far from immune to the different trappings of power but they are characterized by an ability to improvise and imagine, thinking outside established parameters, to relish performing in front of an audience, and, in a curious way, to make their followers feel happy and well. They are in their element in organizations that have a high prole in the media, that rely on image and glamour for their success and whose survival depends on continuous innovation and creativity. They are able to inspire others, creating feelings of hope, effervescence and self-condence. They are likely to be characterized as possessing emotional intelligence (Goleman, 2001; Goleman et al., 2002).

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The experiment
The experiment then was to design and run a course a course for leaders that did not replicate the out-of-date model of the public school, by placing the students in the position of followers. The course was labelled Leadership Specialization, a real oxymoron; it was one of about a dozen such specializations, of which the students elected to take two. About 24 students opted for the course during its rst two years. The course was organized as a sequence of eight sessions, one per week, each lasting an entire day. The course ran in all for three years, before changes in the curriculum structure led to its replacement. In designing the course, I decided to start by removing many of the familiar safety nets that turn prospective leaders into followers. I announced the course with the following statement on the course handout, reiterating it in my rst encounter with the students: leadership is imagining, willing and driving, it is not following instructions on pieces of paper. Make sure that the contents of this handout do not impair your learning but develop it. Instead of proclaiming the course objectives, I left a large blank space in which I invited students to devise their own objectives for the course. On the rst day, I introduced the course as an experiment or, more precisely, as a laboratory for leadership. A laboratory is a place where experiments are carried out, a place of learning and unlearning, a place where success comes out of failure and failure out of success. It is a place where people are vigilant, inquisitive and critical. Finally, a laboratory is not a time-capsule, it is a place of change, a change which is both inner and outer. It is not just that we observe new phenomena, but the eyes with which we observe also change. The metaphor of the laboratory quickly installed itself as a safety net for many of my students. It seduced and animated them. It suggested discovery, risk and boldness in an environment that tolerates failure. At that point, I found myself carrying out the rst of a series of disruptions. The lab imagery can all too easily lapse into one in which I supervise the students experiments or, worse, I treat them as guinea pigs for my own experiments. One can hardly imagine guinea pigs emerging as future leaders and this is certainly not what I wanted to achieve. Also, laboratory-type experiments are liable to Hawthorne effects, with all their attendant distortions. Throughout the rst day of the course, I invited students to participate in a series of thought or action experiments, trying to stimulate their imagination, fantasy and will. The main type of experiment for the course was introduced: the leadership spot. Each student was given a 75-minute period in which to lead the group in whatever activity, exercise or experiment they pleased. Inevitably, during the rst week of the course, I was installed as the leader in the classroom, a role I relinquished from the second week of the course when I invited students to divide up their leadership spots, discuss them and start organizing them. I had envisaged that this process would be a difcult one, with many students wanting to take the later spots to give themselves more time for preparation. This maybe reected my own anxieties about relinquishing the leadership position. As it happens, in all three years, the process was accomplished quickly and efciently, thanks to one or two individuals assuming responsibility for facilitating the process. Leadership spots started on Week 3. During these sessions, I offered myself as a

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resource to the leaders, each one able to use me for whatever purpose they wished, provided obviously that I agreed to act the part. The electricity in the room was plain to all, once I had taken a step back and students found themselves running the show. In the rst place, they had to agree on a wide range of practicalities regarding attendance, late-coming, participation and so on. Time keeping and breaks between the leadership spots became important issues for negotiation, as well as the utilization of audio-visual aids, the rearrangements of chairs and tables in the room and so forth. One great advantage of organizing the course this way was that there was little risk of getting bored. An eight-hour-day breezed by quickly and the entire course over eight weeks seemed to last but an instant. The variety of ideas on which students based their leadership spots was wide. They included:
I

a variety of case studies produced by students on topics they felt strongly about; a variety of visioning, role play and construction exercises; speech writing; outdoor activities; presentations by and interviews of distinguished leaders; dissections of famous and infamous leaders; a singing competition; a Japanese tea ceremony; an origami-learning session; analyses of lms (e.g. The Godfather), speeches (I have a dream), TV shows (Dads Army) and so on; staged debates and discussions.

I I I I I I I I I

The one major change I carried out following the rst years experience was the incorporation of a 45-minute debrieng session at the end of each day of leadership spots. I had initially hoped that each acting leader would factor the debrieng into his/her session but throughout the course during the rst year this did not happen. Avoiding any overt debrieng, criticism or fault-nding became part of a covert psychological contract among the students, one that only unravelled on the last day of the course when we held a general debrief. In the second and third years, debriefing sessions were timetabled and proved very instructive. I tended to keep silent until the end of these sessions, but students were surprisingly outspoken in their evaluations of the days leaders. How was the course assessed? After the end of the programme, each student submitted a portfolio of materials which charted their learnings throughout the course. It was designed to capture total participation and involvement in the course. As a portfolio, it appeared as a collage the different materials did not follow a formal order, nor did they all have to be perfectly polished. While it could show evidence of reading and theories, the portfolio was distinctive in that it provided a richness of materials, unconstrained by a rigid order. Style could be informal and literary. Entries to the portfolio could include the following:

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pictures; anecdotes; thought pieces; diary-type entries about their learning; links to current affairs or issues; reections on the working of the group.

But, they had to include the following (with indicative lengths):

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a review of one academic book on leadership or extensive part of a book this may not be a textbook (34 pages); a review of one book by a leader or about a leader (34 pages); a review of at least one article dealing with leadership (34 pages); a detailed reection on your own leadership spot this may take the form of a small action project (34 pages); reections on the course, including reections of at least three other students leadership spots (23 pages); a short discussion of a leadership story this may come from a book, a myth or may be directly related to you by someone (2 pages); a discussion of one or two metaphors which guide, enhance or illuminate your thinking on leaders, their missions and their relations to their followers (12 pages); a learning diary with no fewer that three dated entries (2 or more pages).

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Portfolios could be as long as students liked but, for the purposes of assessment, I only undertook to read the rst 25 pages. Portfolios were judged as a whole, rather than on the quality of individual components.

The ndings
By most conventional measures the course was a success. Student feedback on both years has been very positive, the quality of work produced on portfolios has been commendable, external examiners reports have been favourable and so forth. Some of the students comments on their anonymous feedback sheets were especially reassuring in suggesting that the course had been effective in educating leaders without turning them into followers. These are some extracts from standard evaluation forms lled by students: This has been the highlight of the MBA for me an excellent learning experience and a welcome change from typical academia. The course was very interactive and the leadership spot helped me to boost my condence as well as differentiate between being a manager and a leader. This has been the most important course for me. While other modules may have had necessary theoretical content, this course developed the practical side. If

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MBAs are ever going to try and create a link between theoretical and practical learning, then this course should become standard. I wish we had more courses like this on the MBA. This was one of the very few times that, as MBA students, we were able to discourse freely as equals. It may not have been quantitative, but I personally was more satised with this course than any of the others. The structure of this course is very unorthodox, relying on leadership spots prepared by students. Nevertheless the course works extremely well, and I think that students learn a great deal. Such comments may gratify the lecturers narcissism but they hardly suggest that the experiment was successful. This is a far more difcult judgement to make. The course undoubtedly shook the students out of the routine of MBA learning. It authorized them to lead and it legitimized ambition and drive. It encouraged them to think creatively and take risks. It brought to the surface some of the difculties of leading others working against apathy or indifference, cynicism and minimalism; it highlighted the difference that leading with vision, vibrancy and conviction can make, even within a 75-minute window. It also showed the importance of good management failing technology, bad timekeeping, neglect of crucial details during the leadership spots were liable to cause frustration and even anger, spoiling some truly excellent core ideas and visions. The course illustrated the strength of negative feelings generated by badly planned, out-of-tune or presumptuous leadership. Maybe the most important lesson generated by the course for the participants was to highlight the responsibility carried by leaders when they operate without a safety net, relying on goodwill, persuasion and inspiration for the achievement of their visions. It is here that doubts begin to arise. All too often, I witnessed students following passively their acting leader, asking few questions and demanding few explanations, as if a tacit agreement had been struck that they would each make their colleagues leadership spots as smooth as possible. On one occasion, during the rst year of the course, a leader divided up the group into three sub-groups, assigned a leader to each one of them and invited them to build a structure out of adhesive tape and newspapers to support a brick at as high a plane as possible. The students followed the instructions without asking for any explanations. The leadership spot was concluded without any discussion at all. Abandoning my usual non-interventionist approach, I ventured to suggest after the session that they had gone about the task like sheep. I must confess that I was surprised by how they accepted to be led in such a manner (basically without asking questions). I was even more surprised by the effect of my intervention. The comment was picked up by many students in their portfolio discussions as a turning point for the course, a crisis point. They had sensed my disappointment but some had been insulted by the sheep metaphor. It was as if that particular comment unsettled what had been a tacit understanding of unconditional support. This incident was crucial for me in deciding to establish regular debriefs at the end of each days leadership spots. Another observation I made was the acting leaders tendency to try and pack too much into their leadership spots, almost invariably running out of time and running into the timetabled breaks. Overstructured and overmanaged leadership spots meant

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that relatively little time was spent on free and unstructured discussion or indeed on thinking. In a paper reporting on a different teaching experiment, David Levine (2002) argued that excessive action in a group can mark a refuge from thinking and a way of coping with anxiety learning from experience then becomes a rationalization for repeating the same experience over and over again, without learning. I must confess that there were times I felt this was precisely how the group was functioning, moving from leadership spot to leadership spot, with feverish activity, dreading the possibility of dead time available for thinking, talking or questioning. Even in the third year of the course when fewer students meant that leadership spots could be expanded to two hours, I observed that nearly all spots overran their allotted time. I came to view the overlling, overstructuring and overmanaging of leadership spots as one of the ways employed by acting leaders to minimize their own anxiety, as well as that of their colleagues. They did, however, create new anxieties, namely those of running into other peoples allotted slots or failing to involve their followers in discussion. There were notable exceptions. For instance, an American student emptied the contents of her desk drawers and brought them to the class, divided them into four piles and invited the group, divided into four sub-groups, to do something interesting with them. This turned out to be one of the most fascinating exercises, where the lack of structure initially triggered acute anxiety and then quite impressive bouts of creativity. Eventually, the different groups used the resources available (buttons, bits of paper, pens, cards and so on) as the wherewithal for different types of bricolage which included childrens games, impromptu sculptures and so forth. Another occasion when intense anxiety was generated was when a leader (known as a prominent member of the London Symphony Orchestra Choir) invited three subgroups to compete in renditions of the well-known song from The Sound of Music, Do-Re-Mi!. In what turned out to be a fascinating session which took place in a public park, the fear of singing in public was gradually overcome, most notably by a group led by a Japanese civil servant. By teaching her followers to sing the song in Japanese she remarkably overcame their inhibitions. I mentioned earlier the strong effect that my comment like sheep had had on the class. One thing I noticed was that my taking a back seat in the course made my pronouncements even more weighty, and certainly more important than I meant them to be. On one occasion, I remarked casually that I wouldnt necessarily be taking this course myself if I were an MBA student. I mentioned this in connection with the claim that this was to be a course for leaders and for people who balance thought with action. I meant it half as self-disparaging and half as a reection on me as an academic as a person of reection and thinking rather than a man of action, I would probably seek a different type of course. Yet, several students raised this comment in their portfolios as something that had undermined their condence in the course.

What the experiment says about the MBA

Throughout the leadership course, I became aware of how difcult it was to evade the position of leading the students on the course, no matter how hard I tried to subvert or undermine my own position or to frustrate the students expectations. The less I said and the less I did, the more meaning was attributed to my actions and utterances almost as if I had become an oracle, whose every nuance needed to be

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interpreted. In one instance, an acting leader excluded me from the classroom in an attempt, he claimed, to free his colleagues from my presence. The response of his followers after the leadership spot was not favourable: some claimed that he had wasted a possible resource (myself), some that he had just tried to be provocative, some that he had wanted to protect himself from possible criticism from me and some, even, that he had been insulting to me by asking me to leave the room. In the last resort, although some students had eeting experiences of leading their peers, my distinct feeling was that whether talking or silent, present or absent, I continued to occupy the position that I can only describe as leader in the mind. And it gradually became clear to me that the starting point of experiment, that of educating leaders without turning them into followers, seems to run counter to much of the ethos of the MBA which is to teach students in highly organized, highly planned ways. It may be countered that experiential and action learning, composed of case studies, role plays, simulations, outdoor activities and the like, are all meant to develop the students judgements and characters as leaders yet, even these action learning devices invite the students to follow instructions, to observe rules and, most importantly, to suspend critical disbelief, in short, to act as followers. It may be an exaggeration to say that MBAs, in general, breed an ethos of dependency, but dependency is one of their major features, and a feature that encourages followership, not leadership. There are two other reasons why my attempts to entice my students to lead each other were not altogether successful. First, there is the powerful ideology of equality, collegiality and team learning in syndicate groups, which in my experience makes the assumption of effective leadership by any one student very difcult, if not impossible. In work that I and a group of colleagues at Imperial College have carried out, we have identied the syndicate group experience as one of the most profound, and often most dysfunctional, among our MBA students. One of the hardest things for such groups to achieve is an acknowledgement of the need for a leader or an acceptance of an individuals claim to leadership, something that becomes almost a taboo. By contrast, the syndicate group experience mythologizes teamwork and proclaims the hero as a team player rather than as a leader or as a follower (Zaleznik, 1989). It was telling to me that more than half of the acting leaders elected to run their leadership spots by subdividing the large group into smaller teams, often assigning them competitive tasks and particular sub-leaders. This suggested a hesitancy about directly leading their peers and a hurried delegation of authority and responsibility to teams. The second reason why leading others runs counter to the MBA ethos is the much debated consumerism that is becoming a dening feature of post-graduate management education. Consumers are now widely recognized as neither passive nor as accepting uncomplainingly what they are offered (Contu et al. 2003; Gabriel & Lang, 1995; Parker & Jary, 1995; Prichard & Willmott, 1997; Ritzer, 1999; Sturdy & Gabriel, 2000). In particular, consumers of knowledge are not simple imitators or followers but active translators and implementers (Gabriel, 2002). I would, however, argue that the asymmetrical relation between consumers and producers is very different from the asymmetrical relations between leaders and followers. As consumers of educational products, students are in a disadvantaged position from which to lead others: they can complain, they can harass, they can pester, they can

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ultimately withdraw their custom, but they cannot lead their lecturers, their administrators or indeed their departments. The best they can do is occasionally lead delegations or rebellions, which maybe is one of the best experiences of leading others that they are likely to get on an MBA. All in all then I would conclude that my leadership experiment drew me to view the MBA experience as one of educating followers, committed followers to be sure, obstinate, hardened lieutenants perhaps, rather than leaders. It is in this sense then that the MBA may be seen as a contemporary parallel to the playing elds of Eton. They are uniquely suited for people who can rise, survive and even prosper in the merciless elds of todays business.1 Such people develop heavily gendered (Sinclair, 1995) and discipline-based concepts of leadership and management, leaning heavily on game and military metaphors, accustomed to treating subordinates as resources to be ordered, deployed and dispensed with, fascinated with Sun Tzus (1963) traditional Chinese war manual as adapted for todays businessman (and much less businesswoman), and perfectly at ease in a world of tactics and strategies, deception and surprise, outanking and outmanoeuvring.

What does the experiment say about leadership?

In this respect, my experiment has lent some weight to an argument put forward by Henry Mintzberg (2004) and colleagues for the past few years, namely that MBA graduates make it to the top, but do not make it at the top (Mintzberg and Lampel, 2001; Mintzberg et al., 2001). Although the experiment was not successful in breaking out of the MBA mould, criticized by Mintzberg and many others (see Currie & Knights, 2003; Grey, 2004; Gosling & Mintzberg, 2004; Kretovics, 1999; Lataif et al., 1992; Sturdy & Gabriel, 2000; Weick, 2001), it has helped me address the paradox mentioned earlier, that the more we learn about leadership, the less we seem to know about it, the more doors we unlock, the more locked doors we seem to nd. While reading the students portfolios in the rst year of the course I sensed, in spite of their positive comments about the course, a vague disappointment that they still felt a kind of vacuum in getting rm answers on leadership. It became clear to me that the reason for this was because of the leadership mystique (Gabriel, 1997; Kets de Vries, 2001; Shils, 1965) or the leadership romance (Meindl and Ehrlich, 1987; Meindl et al., 1985), the exaggerated importance we accord to leadership and leaders, an importance that appears to reect the dominance of parental gures in early childhood. Of course, there are times when leaders can achieve miracles or appear to achieve miracles with the help and contribution of others they can revitalize virtually moribund outts, turn defeat into victory, loss into prot and moral decay into moral purpose. What is unrealistic is to expect such miracle making to become regularized into a blissful routine, a single key that will unlock every situation. Pushing the metaphor, it could be argued that there are different keys for different situations; there may even be certain doors that need two or three keys to unlock; and others that require no key at all, but a rm kick to open them, just as when Alexander the Great untangled the supposedly impossible Gordian knot with a thrust of his sword. What my leadership experiment suggested was that the expectation that all leadership challenges should be approached in the same way, through a single set of theories, qualities or skills (e.g. vision, management of meaning,

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emotional intelligence and so on) is not just awed, but the result of an enduring fantasy of leadership omnipotence. At the time of marking the students portfolios, I came across the following amusing quote from a novel by Russo, called A Straight Man: every complex problem has a simple solution. And every such solution is wrong. This is very often what we mean by the word vision, a simple solution to a complex problem. I would not agree that all such solutions are wrong, but many are. More importantly, the expectation that all complex problems have a simple solution is a wish-fullling fantasy. Besides, sometimes even simple problems do not have simple solutions. Why should all or even most complex problems have simple solutions? By the same token, I would argue that many problems are resolved providentially, even if particular leaders assume credit for their resolution. Although leadership, as we now recognize, may be a relationship, it is also a symbolic space where powerful fantasies are projected. No amount of emphasis on the relationship can stop us lionizing or vilifying leaders. No amount of objective evidence to the contrary will caution us against expecting successful leaders to repeat their success and failed leaders to repeat their failure. And nally, most important of all, no objective evidence will make us reassess the person, the object or the symbol that has come to occupy that important position in the symbolic space that demands to be occupied, that empty throne that demands that something or someone be placed in it.

Conclusion
Starting from a mythological point far removed from my class experiment, Keith Grint (2004) has reached some rather similar conclusions. He drew his inspiration from the second of Hercules 12 labours, the slaying of the Lernaean Hydra, the multi-headed beast with the regenerative ability to grow two heads in place of every severed one. Hercules eventually overcomes the monster not by persevering with a single-tack approach, that of cutting heads, whose net result is to boost it instead, he adopts a exible, multi-pronged approach, cutting and cauterizing the heads, eventually burying the last one. Grint demonstrates that leaders often confront Hydra-like situations, messy situations where the use of any approach, however single-mindedly pursued, will only exacerbate the difculties. Force alone is unlikely to prove effective in such situations; but nor is intelligence, emotional intelligence, bribery or anything else. Instead, these situations call for multi-pronged approaches, involving exibility, inventiveness and improvization. However acute our desire for simple solutions (the vibrant vision, the motivating mission, the merger, the technox, the new appointment and so on), they very rarely work in such situations. Even when they are credited with success, they have never worked in isolation and can never be relied upon to work in the same way again. But maybe the argument can be pressed further. Not only is it unrealistic to expect that all leadership challenges may be solved in the same way through a single device; it is also unrealistic to expect that all the situations experienced as challenges can be unlocked at will. There may, in other words, be situations where leaders are themselves powerless to do anything at all, when they should exercise restraint, accepting a temporary inability to engage in decisive action. As several authors on

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leadership (Bennis, 1998; Chia & Morgan, 1996; Simpson et al., 2002; Weick, 2003) have argued, in such situations, a leader is called to display a quality akin to what the poet John Keats described as negative capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason (Bartlett, 1980: 479). Restraining the tendency to act, to appear to be doing something (which in such situations is almost doomed to be counterproductive) may well be one of the most signicant lessons that a leadership pedagogy should seek to impart. And yet, this is maybe the one tendency which the action-packed, clamorous, workaholic, at times frenzied ethos of most MBAs most effectively blocks.

Notes
1. This idea emerged during a conversation with Ian Mitroff.

References
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Yiannis Gabriel is Professor in Organizational Theory at the Tanaka Business School, Imperial College, London. He has a degree in Mechanical Engineering from Imperial College, London, where he also carried out post-graduate studies in industrial sociology. He has a PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. His main research interests are in organizational theory (especially leadership, group dynamics and organizational culture), consumer studies, management learning and knowledge, storytelling, folklore and psychoanalysis. Gabriel is author of Freud and Society; Working Lives in Catering (both Routledge), Organizations in Depth (SAGE), and Storytelling in Organizations (OUP); and co-author of Organizing and Organizations, The Unmanageable Consumer: Contemporary Consumption and Its Fragmentation and Experiencing Organizations (all SAGE). He has recently edited the collection Myths, Stories and Organizations, published by Oxford University Press in 2004. Other publications include articles and book chapters on

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illness narratives, computer folklore, organizational nostalgia, chaos and complexity in organizations, fantasies of organizational members about their leaders, organizational insults and research methodology using stories and narratives. He has been Editor of Management Learning and Associate Editor of Human Relations. [email: y.gabriel@imperial.ac.uk]

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