Communication technology is rapidly changing the way we interact as humans; affecting social, democratic and corporate cultures. The flow of information now increasingly happens through networks, which in many ways communicate faster and more effectively than so-called traditional hierarchies. Networks have become the new metaphor used to explain human interaction. As Newman, Barabasi, and Watts write in The Structure and Dynamics of Networks, “Networks are everywhere. From the Internet and its close cousin the World Wide Web to networks in economics, networks of disease transmission, and even terrorist networks, the imagery of the network pervades modern culture.” So what constraints does a network system put on a leader, and what does leadership mean in such a system? Network Leadership has two prominent features: attracting attention, and persuading cooperation through a transcendent vision.
In Thinking about Leadership, Nannerl Keohane (referencing Kenneth Janda) describes how leaders are selected in ‘on-going groups of long duration’ by “occupying a position in a formal structure or being given formal status by a legitimizing agent” (55), and that an individual thus selected only needs to “exercise that power base to demonstrate leadership” (55). This may work in a traditional hierarchical organization, but in a network it becomes more complicated. As Newman, Barabasi, and Watts point out, networks that arise naturally (such as social networks), evolve “in a manner that is typically unplanned and decentralized.” Rather than looking at questions of authority and power relations, leadership in a network can be analyzed through “centrality indices . . . and measures of social capital,” with a vocabulary of “actor centrality, path lengths, cliques, connected components” (Newman, Barabasi, and Watts), etc. A great example is the analysis of our Economy which identifies the 50 best connected companies (and therefore most powerful) in the world economy (full article at http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228354.500-revealed--the-capitalist-network-that-runs-the-world.html).
Rather than leadership which depends upon formal hierarchical structures (which is the main focus of Keohane’s study), this is leadership that depends upon catching attention and creating interest; creating groups and communities out of a loosely connected web of individuals. Keohane compares situations like these to the desert island scenario in Lord of the Flies. There a leader may be chosen simply because she is more “articulate or attractive” (55), but the leader also has greater pressure to produce results since she cannot rely on the security commonly afforded by institutional (or traditional) legitimacy (55). What then must a person do to lead in such a society?
First of all, the leader must be able to attract attention. In “The Economics of Attention” Richard A Lanham makes the claim that leadership that depends more on rhetoric than institutional authority is the hallmark of the information age; where the scarce commodity that moves society is not land, labour, or capital, but attention. It is not surprising that the largest emerging companies in this new economy (like Apple, Google, and Facebook) are those who have been able to catch and keep human attention. Quoting Peter Drucker, Lanham writes, “Value is now created by ‘productivity’ and ‘innovation,’ both applications of knowledge to work.” In an age that is drowning in information, it has become more valuable than ever to be able to catch the attention necessary to transform information into knowledge. Lanham writes how this happens through “rhetorical figuration” which can expand and compress attention. This is the same attention that is needed to transform a communicated message into the conviction and dedication a leader needs her followers to have.
In Counter-Statement, Kenneth Burke describes how attention can be caught and kept through literary form. He claims that literary form is achieved by awakening and fulfilling expectations in the audience: “Form in literature is an arousing and fulfilment of desires. A work has form in so far as one part of it leads a reader to anticipate another part” (124). Literary form comes natural to us as humans because it is part of our physical experience. It gives us the experience of a crescendo, which according to Burke “parallels certain psychic and physical processes which are at the roots of our experience” (45): “The accelerated motion of a falling body, the cycle of a storm, the procedure of the sexual act, the ripening of crops”(45), etc. In another description he says “It is the result of certain forces gathering to produce a certain result. It is the suspense of a rubber band which we see being tautened. We know that it will be snapped – there is thus no ignorance of the outcome; our satisfaction arises from our participation in the process” (145). This art of arousing desires is essential to create interest and the space for a potential leader to be able to attract followers. The leader may have the best plan or qualifications in the world, but unless she can attract the attention necessary to persuade her audience it will all be in vain. If she can arouse in her audience the desire to see her vision become reality, they will be personally engaged in the venture she has suggested. This desire will not be fulfilled until the dream has become reality, and the audience will be like the reader reading through the night to experience the completion of a plot. As Burke notes in Essays Toward A Symbolic of Motives, “an orator who is trying to persuade an audience to some decision or attitude must find ways of keeping his audience sufficiently amused so that they will continue to be an audience (though the purpose of his address is not to amuse them, but to enlist them in some ‘cause’)” (38). This indeed was the case in democratic Athens as described in Paul Woodruff’s First Democracy, where rhetors could “exert special influence without holding public office, simply in virtue of their speaking abilities” (33). Through literary form a leader can gain the platform she needs to have the chance to enlist supporters in her cause.
In his essay “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’”, Kenneth Burke writes, “Every movement that would recruit its followers from among discordant and divergent bands, must have some spot towards which all roads lead. Each man may get there in his own way, but it must be one unifying center of reference for all” (192). To create unity out of diversity, the audience has to believe that they do have a core of common interests to unite their efforts. Though they remain individuals with individual experience, they may “identify” with others to join a group if they are persuaded that they have common interests. This implies that in order to get people to follow him, a leader has to communicate a common interest with his audience. A leader may do this by appealing to base needs or and desires such as money, power, common prejudices, or shared cultural heritage. Woodruff explains how Cleocritus was able to unite followers of the tyrants and the democrats by appealing to their common interests and culture as Athenians (First Democracy 83).
However, identification does not always rely upon pre-existing ties of fellowship. Effective leaders are able to create common interests where none may naturally exist. One way to do this is by articulating a vision which, although not initially of interest to the audience, is made interesting by the way it is described and linked with pre-existing interests. In Turnaround: Crisis, Leadership, and the Olympic Games Mitt Romney describes the task of leadership as “creating a vision of higher purpose and . . . offering challenges beyond normal expectations” (xix). He writes, “Our task was to identify a defining vision, communicate that in a compelling way, and provide the kind of focus that reinforces that vision as a living, breathing thing, not just lip service. And if we were to succeed, it would be because of the commitment to that vision by the entire team, and by the community” (xix). The Salt Lake City Olympic Games are an interesting example. Here highly qualified people had to be persuaded to give up higher paying jobs to do more for less pay and without any certainty of work after the Games were finished. They had to be committed to a vision of higher purpose than their individual interests.
What is meant by ‘higher’ purpose? In Plato’s Phaedrus, leadership is not simply exploiting base interests to gain power over people, “dispensing miserly benefits of a mortal kind” (38), but rather a transcending process which brings both leader and follower closer to the gods. This transcendence is at once altruistic and egoistic. One gets personal benefit not by satisfying base passions, but by summoning one’s abilities to reach a new, higher level. As Socrates says, “they become winged and light, and have won one of their three submissions in these, the true Olympic games, and neither human sanity nor divine madness has any greater good to offer a man than this” (37-38). The concept of transcendence described by Socrates takes on metaphysical qualities as the base passions of man are overcome by divine madness (i.e. true love) which brings both leader and follower beyond this world.
What can this representation teach us about creating a transcendent vision? A transcendent vision need not be religious, neither does it have to be ethical. What such a vision does is that it paints an alternate version of reality to which the group can subscribe and which demands that individuals to a certain extent mortify their selfish desires for “the greater good.” It has to be idealistic, even though the ideals may be false. This in turn can fulfill the yearning human beings have to experience a sense of purpose and unity. Burke claims, “The yearning for unity is so great that people are always willing to meet you halfway if you will give it to them by fiat, by flat statement, regardless of the facts” (“Hitler’s ‘Battle’” 205-206). A vision is an abstraction of life where people from different walks of life can experience unity and a higher purpose which is normally prevented by our separate experiences of life. An effective leader must be able to catch the attention of other human beings and tap into their desire for unity and purpose by creating a vision as a banner under which they can gather. At the start of the Battle of Britain, Winston Churchill raised that banner for Britain and the free world.
In “Art, and the First Rough Draft of Living” Burke mentions that Kant “held that we should treat the moral law ‘as if’ it were supernaturally sanctioned, whether or not we believe in dogmas that would ‘prove’ it so. And in living by such an ‘as if,’ men can make themselves a better world” (157). The effective leader creates an ‘as if’ worth living by.