How Vision Can Create Community and Culture

I think the most important single thing I have learned from studying leadership in the context of learning in the humanities is how important vision is to any cooperative enterprise. I want to show briefly how a vision can be a powerful tool to encourage cooperation, provide some examples I have come across, and show how Kenneth Burke’s methods can be helpful in its development, communication, and execution. A well-defined vision can focus individual efforts towards common goals and provide the motivation which persuades a highly individualistic population to think in terms of ‘we’ and ‘ours.’ As John Dewey writes in “Search for the Great Community,” “’we’ and ‘our’ exist only when the consequences of combined action are perceived and become an object of desire and effort” (151). A vision contains those desired consequences of combined action and the means whereby they can become reality. When this vision is consciously sustained and nurtured we get what for Dewey would qualify as a community. The values and practices this community adopts to achieve that vision is what we would call ‘culture.’

                Culture has become a buzz-word in modern business. As Human Synergistics International notes in “Culture Makes the Difference in Business Objects and Crystal Decisions Merger”: “Constructive cultures are worth the effort to develop as they are positively correlated with high levels of motivation, cooperation, performance, and quality” (2). In “Building Your Company’s Vision” James. C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras claim: “The dynamic [or culture] . . . is the primary engine of enduring companies. Vision simply provides the context for bringing this dynamic to life” (77). In other words, the vision by itself does nothing. However, the vision can create the framework and direction to channel subsequent action if the community accepts the vision and aligns itself to it. The vision outlines a way of life and a way of thinking. As Collins and Porras claim, “When you have a superb alignment, a visitor could drop in from outer space and infer your vision from the operations and activities of the company without ever reading it on paper or meeting a single senior executive” (77). We can infer from these statements that creating and communicating a vision, and aligning the company culture to it, are some of the most important tasks a leader has. I will show how a study in the humanities can provide valuable skills to assist in these endeavours, because the humanities chronicle centuries of experience with the same work of human motivation and identification.

                In First Democracy Paul Woodruff describes how a democratic culture was created and nurtured by shared experience, rituals, theatre, and public speeches. The culture created by Athens’ heroes lived longer than their progenitors, and the essential democratic virtues of humility and harmony were central themes in plays and poems. The Blithedale Romance chronicles the collapse of a common endeavour due to a weak vision which never fully translated into the culture of the community, and thus did not have the strength to hold the community together in the face of individualistic ambitions. And the work of Kenneth Burke is focused on “the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols” (Rhetoric 43).

 Kenneth Burke offers some of the best insights on how language can be used to induce cooperation, and his theory of dialectical transcendence directly describes the mechanisms of a persuasive vision. As he writes in “I, Eye, Aye: Emerson’s Early Essay on ‘Nature’: Thoughts on the Machinery of Transcendence,” transcending is “the building of a terministic bridge whereby one realm is transcended by being viewed in terms of a realm ‘beyond’ it” (877), and “insofar as things here and now are treated in terms of a ‘beyond’, they thereby become infused or inspirited by the addition of a new or further dimension” (880). The vision provides a greater reference point which infuses the individual tasks of a worker with meaning. According to Collins and Porras, a vision is both discovered (core ideals) and created (envisioned future, purpose, etc.). Burke’s method of dialectic transcendence can work both as a heuristic to develop a vision (seek to go from particular to more general and abstract ideas) and as an analytic tool to discover ideals implicit in the symbol system of a community. With the help of Burke’s method of indexing, it should be possible to chart the relationships which uncover the structure of a symbol-system, including which ideas are more important and have greater transcendent value than others. Because of the limited scope of this paper, only a brief explanation will be given for this method: In “Linguistic Approach to Problems in Education” Kenneth Burke outlines his method of indexing. The steps of this method would be to first find the terms that regularly occur together in a text, mapping which words are socially inferior or superior, and finding from this the verbal pyramids which contain words of higher abstraction which subordinate or gather other words. He believed this method could uncover the ‘personality’ or, if you will, ‘culture’ of the text. He also claimed that this method could be applied to all human communication as well as literary texts. This same method can be used to evaluate alignment to the vision that has been outlined, for, as Collins and Porras claim, when a company has perfect alignment to vision “a visitor could drop in from outer space and infer your vision from the operations and activities of the company” (77). Such alignment to vision should leave a clear linguistic trace which can be tracked from internal communications.

For a vision to be effective it is essential that it is communicated clearly to all the members of the community, and that they in turn are persuaded to adopt the vision as a guide for their actions. If their individual tasks are linked clearly enough to a desirable and shared vision they are likely to be more motivated to work towards its fulfillment. In “Rhetoric – Old and New,” Burke claims that “a rhetorical structure is most persuasive when it possesses full dialectical symmetry – or, otherwise put, dialectical symmetry is at once the perfecting and transcending of rhetoric” (204). In other words, the rhetorical structure will be most effective if there are clear steps and connections between the transcendent purpose and the particular actions of the individuals in the group. In order to make this clear to understand one could create a graphic way of displaying the ‘verbal pyramid’ which connects particular tasks (lower steps) with the transcendent vision (higher steps). W.L.Gore and Associates, a company which has a strong focus on developing their culture, have designed a graphic where the vision stands at the core and is surrounded by layers with greater degrees of abstraction closer to the core.

At the core we find “What We Believe” followed by “Guiding Principles”, “Core Values”, “Key Disciplines”, and finally ending with “Practices.” Terri Kelly, the CEO of the company, explained the importance of this model at an MIT lecture titled “Nurturing Culture to Drive Innovation”:

Because the culture is such a rich part of how we communicate in our organization and how we want to drive both actions and behaviours, you will find a poster like this in probably every plant conference room at Gore, and the reason is we want it to drive our conversation. So, with a lot of companies you hear about their values and you hear about their culture, but if it’s not an integral part of how you make decisions and how leaders talk about how we get the work done, it really becomes pretty superficial.

                 

I am currently writing my master thesis about the method of indexing and dialectical transcendence. This course has made it clear to me how these methods could not only be useful but extremely valuable in a market context. In one instance mentioned by Human Synergistics International, a clear evaluation of company culture and the reformulation and communication of a vision basically doubled the value of two companies over a short period of time (“Culture” 3). The valuable work of Kenneth Burke, along with that of many other humanists, can give fresh insights to business because its line of inquiry starts with different premises, which are more based on human nature than mere profit. As the focus of the business world shifts from capital and property to productivity and innovation (which Richard Lanham claims are the new wealth-creating activities) concepts like culture, community, and vision will become even more prominent. More efforts will be made to understand human nature and the discovery, creation, and communication of knowledge. As such, I feel very confident that the Humanities will become a more prominent and desired source of knowledge for society. We just have to communicate what we have to offer. 

Innovative Education for a New Century

I was recently asked how I would design a university for the new millennium if I were given the chance to be apart of such a project, especially how I would design the teaching of my field (Rhetoric). I wrote this for my reply, and although it is a draft I believe that in my proposal I have been able to sketch some of the main challenges and solutions for modern education.

Preamble

                In “Changing Education Paradigms” Ken Robinson states that public education was conceived to meet the needs of industrialism and the institutions of public education were formed in its image. As Thomas Miller confirms in The Evolution of College English, institutions of higher learning followed the same patterns. Harvard and Yale, along with most other Ivy League schools, were initially founded to educate clergy for the work of the ministry. Due to pressure from both students and the merchant class, they gradually condescended to prepare graduates for other careers in law, trade, and primary education. This pattern has repeated itself again and again, showing clearly that universities, traditionally conceived, are endemically conservative institutions which furiously resist change and innovation in curriculum, canon, pedagogy, and institutional hierarchy. It is therefore no wonder that in an increasingly competitive world where change is accelerating, universities have fallen far behind society in developments of culture, methodology, and accountability. As a result they are failing to prepare students to make meaningful contributions in a modern society and economy.

Our Board of Trustees noted that “the pace of change in the economy and in our democratic society will require inventive, versatile, and nimble learners.” In order to educate such students, we have to question the assumptions that have dictated our educational traditions for centuries, and seek to learn from best practices in business, education, government, and non-profit sectors all around the world. A very basic inquiry so far has led us to certain principles of behavior which again suggest changes in educational policy and practice. You can see Ken Robinson's analysis in the video below, which is brief, entertaining, brilliant, and explains the background for my reinvention of English Departments and university structures.

Core Principle: Collaborative Communities, Not Individual Genius, Are the Engines of Innovation

Study after study has shown conclusively that group dynamics is one of the strongest controllable factors which reduce or increase innovation, even greater than individual ability. This flies in the face of educational practices such as individual testing and auditorium lectures; as well as professional practices which do not encourage collaboration and co-authorship across disciplines and penalize such work in tenure reviews. The structure of a traditional English Department, with closed-off offices, limited common areas, and socializing events generally organized within departments, plays to the Romantic ideal of the prophet-poet in voluntary seclusion to be “unsullied by the world.” Too often, this disinterest in the welfare of the world, nation, city, or even department is all too perfectly achieved, and as a result many educators are unable to articulate exactly why the world should be interested in what they have to say.

Implication 1: Focus Teaching and Research in Voluntary Centers, Not Departments

At W.L. Gore and Associates, which for the last eleven years has been ranked highest both in innovativeness and employee satisfaction, they noticed that large facilities and plants significantly reduced capacity for innovation and growth. As a result they focused their business model on small teams working together in locations which seldom exceeded 250 employees. This despite the fact that W.L.Gore hires thousands of employees all over the world. The research and teaching of professors should be focused in centers working towards specific purposes. Thomas Miller gives an example from Temple University where the Institute “brought together poets, critical pedagogues, social activists, and others involved with literary and cultural studies” (246) around literary studies and democratic culture. One center at New Millennium University could be called “Center for Democratic Leadership” with a focus on democratic experience and collaborative action. The approach would be inter-disciplinary, bringing together scholars in rhetoric, literature, political science, organizational behavior, communication studies, etc. Professors would apply for temporary positions, with the center of their choice much like workers (called associates) at Gore are not assigned tasks, but rather apply for the projects they themselves find interesting. As such they are invested in the center’s success and they have personally committed to work towards common goals.

                Implication 2: Leadership through Persuasion, Not By Coercion

In “Harnessing the Science of Persuasion” Robert B Cialdini outlines the challenge of leadership for corporate executives:

[They] every day have to figure out how to motivate and direct a highly individualistic work force. Playing the ‘Because I’m the boss’ card is out. Even if it weren’t demeaning and demoralizing for all concerned, it would be out of place in a world where cross-functional teams, joint ventures, and intercompany partnerships have blurred the lines of authority. In such an environment, persuasion skills exert far greater influence over others than formal power structures do. (72)   

The centers are established on a temporary basis by allowing professors formulate their own ideas for them with main objectives and a tentative mission statement sketched out. They would then present their ideas to the greater body of faculty to generate interest and applications for their center. A center without applications or followers will simply cease to exist before it has started. It is a necessary prerequisite to this approach that all faculty operate as equals without the constraints of a hierarchy. To end the multi-tiered system of tenured professors, untenured adjuncts, and lecturers, the system of tenure should not be established. A relatively high entrance-level salary, combined with opportunities for academic development and an innovative culture will still attract strong talent to the university. The contract of any professor will go through regular performance reviews, and one thorough review every five years. Ending tenure will render all individual professors accountable to the collective faculty body and to the student body. It also makes the university climate more dynamic with more new hires and project-driven focus. The professors themselves need to be examples of mobility, innovation, adaptability, and creativity if that is what we want our students to become. A regular student will have at least eight different jobs throughout their career, and professors themselves need to develop some of that experience. Additionally, the “spontaneous” nature of followership means that leaders will emerge inasmuch as they possess and display qualities of leadership similar to those the students will need to be leaders in their work. The personal development of faculty will be directed towards leadership and collaboration, since these are some of the keys for higher pay. As at Gore, the salary of professors will be determined by their peers based on the value of their contributions to the team.

                Implication 3: Organize Based on Purpose, Not Educational Background 

Although there will still be a Department of English, enlisting an equal balance of professors in Literature, Rhetoric and Composition, English Education, and English Language, the focus of the university will be built around the innovative centers. Department of English Literacy is quite cumbersome, and would almost necessitate the suffix of “literacy” to be added to just about every department at the university (Information Systems Literacy, Science Literacy, Communications Literacy, etc.). Literacy broadly speaking means to be able to understand and use a certain symbol-system for a certain purpose. In a world and university with many symbol systems (and every teacher operates in several of them) it makes more sense for scholarly work and teaching to be focused around purpose (as in the centers) than means.

                The focus on purpose would also be a central factor in the hiring process. Without tenure the university has more options to hire faculty specifically for individual projects; generally they should be looking for people who will not only fit the skill sets needed for the job, but who also feel comfortable and can contribute in the organizational culture. The university should hire not only Ph.D.s, but also master students and bachelor students with significant professional experience in their fields. For example, Rhetoric students should be able to learn from social activists, speech writers, public relations professionals, political strategists, negotiators, etc. who could teach them how to apply rhetorical principles in specific rhetorical situations. Especially professional experience, and experience in community work and outreach, applying the principles of the field should be desired qualities for hiring.

                Implication 4: Students Should Be Taught and Evaluated in a Collaborative Community

Almost every sector outside of education has understood that collaboration is the stuff of growth, and that is the general situation graduates will face, whether in business, government, or not-for-profit organizations. Yet universities are stuck in paradigms which try to measure intelligence, analysis, and learning individually. The timed test does not correspond to any meaningful activity in a modern society. It is more a test of memorization techniques than of intelligence, analytical ability, or even comprehension. Group projects, research, presentations, and proposals on the other hand have a more direct relation to valuable production in a modern society. Though there are many different approaches and methods in the various fields at a university, there are some common goals which should direct the undergraduate teaching: 1. Learning and evaluation should be collaborative, and 2. Teaching and evaluation should always include an element of practical application of the principles learned in the course. This practical application should preferably be connected to solving real problems, and should be connected to the over-all purpose of the center which the professor belongs to. In this way the students themselves can participate in research, community outreach, and problem-solving, which will make them more attractive for the labor market. Because of this focus on group work, all students need to learn basic skills of communication and collaboration. This will be accomplished by requiring all students to take a class in Rhetoric and Composition and a class in Organizational Behavior in their first year of college, preferably in the first semester. Some of these classes can be taught by graduate students in order to give them valuable experience in teaching, but at least half of the classes should be taught by experienced faculty who can train and supervise one graduate student each. These courses are the foundation for the rest of the university education for the incoming students, and as such they must be given the most careful oversight.

Final notes on Majors, Minors, and GE

                The General Education requirements would remain pretty much as they are today. The English major would be much more flexible with equal amount of choices among the four foundations of English (language, literature, education, and rhetoric). To fulfill the General Education requirement every student should take at least one class about the rhetorical conventions of their chosen major. For example, there would be a class on “The Rhetoric of Physics,” “The Rhetoric of Math,” or “The Rhetoric of Dance,” since all disciplines to a certain extent depend upon written knowledge to store and transmit information. The classes would feature some genre theory from Devitt, discourse theory from Kenneth Burke, and Wayne Booth’s “Motivism and the Loss of Good Reason.” These would be the tools students would then use to analyze the current discourses of the scholarly community in their field to discover trends, analyze what counts for sufficient evidence, and the attitudes and values which the community holds In common. The GE requirement in literature would be a course in literary analysis, featuring deep reading of works from several periods of American or British Literature. Education and language would feature a course together, teaching language and language pedagogy, culminating in community outreach teaching English language to pupils in high school and primary school that are struggling with the concepts of the English language. The minimum requirement (excluding the First Year Composition program) would be 9 credit hours.

                Each of the four pillars of English would have their own minor, with one English major featuring optional courses from all four fields but at least one of each required. All English major graduates should know the fundamentals of literature, education, language, and rhetoric. The English majors should be able to shop around to form their major according to their career plan and interests. For Rhetoric it is essential that courses are established in The Rhetoric of Social Media and Online Communities. It should be a course which allows the student to try to establish an online presence and attract an online audience by using Kenneth Burke’s literary form to keep attention and Internet advertising tools to attract it.

The Daily and the Divine

In a world with a highly individualistic population a leader has to be able to lead by attracting a crowd and forming a community with common goals. The world of modern communication technology brings people together in organic network structures, but that does not automatically create a community.

In “Search for the Great Community” John Dewey notes that “associated or joint activity is a condition of the creation of a community” (151), but though association may be physical and organic, “communal life is moral, that is emotionally, intellectually, consciously sustained” (151). In other words, though human networks may form spontaneously, a community can only be created and sustained through conscious effort. As he goes on to say, “’we’ and ‘our’ exist only when the consequences of combined action are perceived and become an object of desire and effort” (151). The individual must be able to envision positive consequences from a community which he cannot achieve as an individual, and then work consistently towards those consequences. A leader must therefore be able to develop a vision, or help articulate consequences which many individuals would see as desirable, and then identify the processes and values which will lead to those consequences.

In order for these ‘consequences of combined action’ to be a vivid and sustainable motivation for all involved, it must have a quality which transcends the differences of individual experience. They must be able to see the menial chores involved in any endeavour as more than useless labour. This can be done through what Kenneth Burke refers to as ‘dialectical transcendence’. As Burke writes in “I, Eye, Ay: Emerson’s Early Essay on ‘Nature’: Thoughts on the Machinery of Transcendence,” transcending is “the building of a terministic bridge whereby one realm is transcended by being viewed in terms of a realm ‘beyond’ it” (877), and “insofar as things here and now are treated in terms of a ‘beyond’, they thereby become infused or inspirited by the addition of a new or further dimension” (880). This can be done by ascending from “particular to general” (881). For example, ‘sweeping the floor’ can be generalized to ‘menial chores’ which again (depending on the context) can be generalized to ‘blood, sweat, and tears’ which are particular manifestations of ‘diligence’, ‘unfailing dedication to the cause’, or ‘service to God’. Burke claims, “When we arrive at this stage, the over-all term-of-terms or title-of-titles is so comprehensive it is simultaneously nowhere and everywhere” (881). If we see ‘service to God’ as this term-of-terms, all the lower levels of ‘blood, sweat, and tears’, ‘menial chores’, and ‘sweeping the floor’ are suddenly inspirited with the a divine touch. This may not change the nature of the physical act itself, but it changes the meaning of the act. This Upward and Downward way form what Kenneth Burke called “dialectical pyramids” (“Rhetoric – Old and New” 204). Such transcendence can serve as a powerful centripetal force for the community to keep the ambitions, desires, and efforts of the individuals centred in a common purpose.

Observe for example how Gandalf helps Pippin transcend the fear of death by seeing it in terms of the White Shores of Valinor beyond.

Journeys of dialectical transcendence can be found almost anywhere in human communication. In “Rhetoric – Old and New” Kenneth Burke claims that “we are continually encountering fragmentary variants of them” (204). This is because “the machinery of language is so made that things are necessarily placed in terms of a range broader than the terms for those things themselves. And thereby, even in the toughest or tiniest of terminologies . . . we consider things in terms of a broader scope than the terms for those particular things themselves” (“Transcendence” 895). Either the human mind or the instruments for communication are so constructed that they seek for meaning beyond the simple term. It is Burke’s claim that “wherever there are traces of that process, there are the makings of Transcendence” (“Transcendence” 895). This means that even if the leader does not help the group develop the desired vision whereby individual actions are endowed with communal meaning, some form of dialectical transcendence will develop. However, the individualistic inclinations in the group may construct a ‘dialectical pyramid’ which is subversive to the unity of the group and works as a centrifugal force driving people away from the centre. Instead of ‘service of God’ the tasks may be seen in the light of ‘capitalist exploitation’ or ‘slavery’. A chronically depressed person may see every aspect of her life as evidence that ‘God hates me’. These different perspectives will not only affect the communal meaning of individual efforts. Eventually it will affect performance, and may threaten the very existence of a group. Without a strong transcendent vision the centrifugal forces of individualism may very easily tear the community apart.

For the leader then, it is essential to 1) be aware of the mechanisms of dialectical transcendence, and 2) lead by establishing a powerful vision or narrative which unites individual efforts in a common purpose towards a desired outcome. In A Rhetoric of Motives Kenneth Burke describes rhetoric as “the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols” (43). Dialectical transcendence is a way to use language to induce cooperation. A study of rhetoric leads a student through theories regarding human motivation and how language can be used to motivate humans to act in a certain way. It also provides students with opportunities to practice using diverse mechanisms of language to induce cooperation on a practical level. As such the study of rhetoric can help prepare a student to become a leader in a modern interconnected world. Although ‘fragments’ of dialectical pyramids can be found in all language usage it can be honed and perfected by practice, and that makes a difference. As Burke writes in “Rhetoric – Old and New”, “a rhetorical structure is most persuasive when it possesses full dialectical symmetry – or, otherwise put, dialectical symmetry is at once the perfecting and transcending of rhetoric” (204).

How to Become a Central Hub in a Network World

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.