This book is a must read for all students of leadership and politics. I recommend it as part of your summer read.

In it, the veteran chief executive officer of Chrysler Motor Corporation, Lee Iacocca, shared his experience managing business corporations with us; he suggests that managing business is pretty much like managing people everywhere. However, business corporations are not democratic since CEOs have the ability to hire and fire at will, an impossible task in government bureaucracies. In politics leaders have to have negotiating skills and bargain with other leaders and resulting public policies are a product of give and take, bargaining, horse trading, compromises, whereas in business the CEO pretty much can do anything he wants to do as long as his Board of Directors are with him, and take the consequences of his behaviors, such as get fired if he does not make profit for his shareholders.

Iacocca defines leadership/management/ supervision as setting priorities (goals) and recruiting the right people, team, to help achieve them. Once goals (priorities) have been clarified, it is very critical to hire the people with the right skills and who can work well with the leader to achieve them.

To achieve anything worthwhile in this world requires good teamwork and if the leader brings the wrong team together they are not going to achieve their goals. (Tell me about that, I once had the wrong team and they almost defeated my organization’s goals).

Iacocca observed that his fifty years of experience in the auto industry led him to believe that leaders must have the following nine attributes: curiosity, creativity, ability to communicate, good character, courage, conviction, charisma, competence, and common sense. He said that when he hired those who worked for them that he evaluated them on the bases of these nine characteristics of leadership.

Is the potential leader curious about his world, is he able to come up with creative and new ways to deal with problems, does he have the ability to communicate his ideas to other people (leadership is about using people to accomplish goals so one must communicate those goals to the followers), does he have a character that men can trust, is he courageous and able to stand his ground even when his friends abandon him, does he have the courage of his conviction and do things because he believes in them, does he have that indescribable quality that makes men follow him to where he wants to go, charisma, has he demonstrated competence in doing something related to the present tasks at hand, the leadership situation, and does he possess good old commonsense or does he live in the abstract world, the world of ideals but not the practical world? A leader is a doer, a pragmatist who works with men in accomplishing goals, not a professor who talks and does not necessarily do what he talks about.

Having posited what seems to him the characteristics of good leaders, Iacocca used them to evaluate past, present and future American leaders.

He identified Franklyn Delano Roosevelt as one leader that possesses most of his attributes and George Bush as possessing zero leadership attributes.

Iacocca evaluated the wannabe presidents of America : Hillary Clinton, Barrack Obama, John Edwards, Giuliani and Romney etc and tells us his perception of their leadership qualities. Of course, his judgment is subjective and should be seen as such, they are interesting though.

Iacocca then delved into the heart of his angst, the apparent dearth of leadership in contemporary America . Where have all the good leaders gone? Why are Americans cursed with the likes of George Bush? How can America , a country with many sophisticated persons produce a liar, George Bush as her leader? As Iacocca sees it, Bush minor, lied to take Americans to war; he said that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction when he did not; Bush, went to war to kill Hussein for Hussein wanted to kill his daddy, Bush senior.

It is incredible that George Bush, an intellectual midget, is America ’s President. Just thinking about this Bush boy in the White House gives one headache. How did we come to this state in our political evolution that we have a dummy in the highest position in the land? Where have all the good men gone to leave us with a brain dead moron like Bush in power?

Iacocca railed against America ’s current leadership crop. Under the watch of these clowns America is living on borrowed capital; our debt is now over eight trillion dollars and rising. How are we going to pay this up? Our trade deficit is climbing. Japan , China , and now India have entered the picture as great economic powers, and some say that in ten years China would surpass the USA as the number one economic power. So, what exactly are our leaders doing about this dreadful situation?

Our manufacturing works are disappearing to other countries and yet no one has the guts to do something about it. We negotiate unfair trade relationships with other countries (for example, Japan sells its goods to America but uses its culture to discourage its people from buying American goods). What exactly are we? Brain dead persons? How come we no longer produce leaders who rise to the occasion and solve problems staring us in the face?

On September 11, 2001 Arab Muslin terrorists attacked America . But what have we done in response to that dastardly attack on us? We passed laws, such as the Patriot Act, to strip our people of their civil liberties! We have established a humongous bureaucracy called Department of Homeland Security and given it one function: to harass Americans at airports but in the meantime do nothing proactively to stop terrorists (they are reactive). Is this leadership or what? Other people attack us and we destroy our democracy and in its place institute a dictatorship of the dummy? My God, this is unbelievable; can you believe what the Bush crowd is doing to America ? Osama Bin Laden is running around, loose, and we restrict the liberties of our people? Amazing!

We have immigrants from the third world swamping America and cheapening labor and we do nothing about it. Perhaps, we want to become a third world country?

Iacocca raved and ranted about the trouble with contemporary America and offered his recommendations as to what to do about them. He is a straight shooter and said what is in his mind, no holds barred. He wants Americans to rise up and take back their country from the “do nothing leaders” that are in Washington . He wants good leaders to rise to the occasion and save America from what America has become. Would good leaders please rise and lead America to her promised land?

This is book reads like a book one would expect a militant youth to write rather than an eighty two year old man writing it. It delineated what is wrong with America . Consider the diminishing middle class. We all know that democracy is predicated on the presence of a vibrant middle class. America is producing fewer middle class jobs but more minimum wage jobs. What does this bode for America ? Would the country become divided into the haves and have nots? That would be a recipe for forms of government other than democracy? Are we gradually slouching towards Gomorrah , oligarchy, aristocracy, monarchy?

See, we have had two Bushes in a row and soon may have two Clintons in the White House and after that may be another Bush (Jeb). Is this what our founding fathers had in mind when they founded this unique experiment in the governance of human beings?

To run for political offices is now so expensive that only the very rich (and or those able to generate contributions) can run for office. A typical Senate seat may cost sixty million dollars and the presidency may cost half a billion dollars. Is this democracy or what?

I do not know that Iacocca has the solution to the myriad problems that he identified. What seems crystal clear in his book is that he wants Americans to do something about their problems, to take back their country. He wants Americans to elect the right leaders who would solve problems rather than avoid them. For example, we all know that we must solve the Health Care crisis but every politician keeps quiet instead of taking the bull by the horn and give all Americans affordable health care without going socialist.

Iacocca is a refreshing read; he provides us with a useful definition of leadership and catalogues our extant problems. His book would make you think. That is good enough.

Think about the problems confronting us and stop placing them on the back burner and pretending that they do not exist. For example, there are really changes in the environment; think about it and what we as a people could do about it. Think about what we could do about our dependency on Middle Eastern oil.

Think and come up with creative solutions to identified problems and sell your views to the people; that are what leaders do.

Become a leader for leadership traits are not inborn but learned. A leader is a person who perceives problems confronting his society and comes up with solutions to them and mobilizes people and material and goes about solving them.

I say, read this book if you aspire to leadership positions.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

May 29, 2007

ozodiosuji@gmail.com

Robot  Villager

# 1 var sbtitle4969=encodeURIComponent(Where Have ...Read the full article. Posted by Robot| 29.05.2007 18:29