Colin Bower and Stephanie Vermeulen

A blog presented by Colin Bower, authors if the soon-to-be-published book of the same name.
Here’s why Colin has written their book:

The planet is obsessed with the concept and the claims of leadership. But if we want to push outwards the frontiers of freedom and equity in societies everywhere we must begin by losing our reverence for the great leader concept, and our ready compliance in the self-creating myths of those who set themselves up as our leaders, and who thereby condemn us to being followers. Leadership has its origins in the patriarchal and in the militaristic hierarchies of the closed society, and it has no place in the post-colonial, liberal and democratic open society, which depends for its success in part on human virtues such as courage and integrity, but most of all on that humble and generally ignored human capability, competence.
Leadership is the single most over-hyped concept in the world, a useless value, and a bogus virtue. It is a mask that exists to hide authoritarianism and the objectionable human tendency to seek and exercise power, to control the lives of others, to manipulate, and to exploit. The sooner we rid ourselves of this fixation we have with leadership, and the wannabe leaders who promote the concept, the sooner we will be able to set about building new democratic institutions and communities, or enhancing the ones we already have, and the sooner we will be able to get on with the real task we have in life, which is to discover who we are, and to become better human beings.
And yet, for the present, the inhabitants of planet earth remain besotted with the notion that leadership is the core distinguishing quality of human greatness and of human capability. In every nook and cranny of our lives as human beings, as children or as parents, as friends or as life partners, as workers and managers, in philanthropic organizations and – of course – in political organizations, we encounter this obsession with the putative quality and value of leadership.
It is the central thesis of this book that we should:
· rip the mask loose
· expose the leadership concept for what it is
· rid our public discourse of this obsessive interest in it
· refresh our lives and the relationships that constitute them by withholding the rights of legitimacy from those who claim to want to lead us, and
· encourage a vigorous sense of individual adequacy that is always an antidote to the poison of leadership.

It is, we argue, the core characteristic of a democracy that authority lies irrevocably in the hands of the members of that democracy, who appoint servants to do their bidding, not leaders. In these the early years of the 21st Century, 250 year after the Enlightenment, more than two centuries after the American War of Independence and the Fall of the Bastille, more than a century after the abolition of slavery, and many decades since colonialism was stopped in its tracks and the Berlin Wall came down, none of us any longer need to be lead to any promised land.
From the time over 400 years ago when Thomas Hobbes could famously describe life as “nasty, poor, solitary, brutish and short” , we have made astonishing progress in the piecemeal reconstitution of our societies away from monarchies, oligopolies and tyrannies towards egalitarian democracies in which it is the right of every person to pursue his or her own goal of happiness.
This is, of course, a broad-brush description. The two mighty wars of the 20th Century, the invention and use of the atom bomb, the dogged persistence of human irrationality and prejudice all play a part in reminding us of our fallibility, and can undermine the notion of progress. But still, with the advent of liberal democracies, characterised by regular elections, by the separation of the powers of the state, by freedom of speech, and by security of property-ownership has brought about, a global revolution has taken place. And if you go along with our view that we have invented a new and a better way to live than we have ever seen before in the history of the emergence of homo sapiens, then you might be inclined to wonder, along with us, why it is that we continue to cling to our belief in the value of leaders and leadership.
We have arrived at a point of our cultural evolution when the only person any of us should ever want to lead is ourself.