Leadership

With W's speech about the future of Iraq this week, I've heard a lot of Republican's pumping up the leadership qualities of W. Leadership, to them, appears to be a function of being able to state a vision and a willingness to follow through on the vision come hell or high water.

First off, I'd like to see some actual studies (real studies) of the qualities successful leaders have. And by that I don't mean the qualities that got a person like W into a position of power. I mean the qualities that led to some objective success.

It seems to me that Bush is like a lot of "leaders" I've met in my life; his skillset isn't actually leading. It's convincing people he is a leader and getting them invest personally into his leadership. That is definitely a skill, and W seems good at it. But, frankly, it doesn't strike me as leadership.

In my experience, good leaders are able to articulate visions, but also able to adapt to changing circumstance and learn from their failure. Successful leaders work to maximize what the can control, minimize what they can't all with the goal of navigating the choppy waters of whatever business/erndeavor they are in.

I can credit Bush for his vision, but the problem to me has never been one of resolve. It's been one of adaptability. In steadfastly refusing to learn from mistakes (which happen) or even accept the underlying reasons for those mistakes I see no reason to believe this administration won't make more.

In fact, the underlying philosophy of the administration seems to be that they will bend reality to their will through sheer doggedness.

In a lot of ways this is a very American trait; it's often been said that while American's refuse to accept defeat or nobility in failure..... but if you look at leadership as what approach (and I am sure there are more than one, and in fact different styles that work better in different dynamics) yields better outcomes it seems to me one that is based on adapting to reality, identifying strengths and minimizing weaknesses works better than just ignoring and plowing through.