Title: The Cult of the Leader
Author: Christopher Bones
Date: January 2011
Publisher: Wiley
Price: £18.99
ISBN: 978-0-470-66604-3

Christopher Bones’ wonderfully forthright book explodes with righteous indignation at the idealisation of leaders over the past 30 years. He points to the twin fantasies of leadership perfection and the ‘war for talent’, blaming them for developing a cult of super-hero leadership, hyped by the wide-eyed adoration of the media.

The identification of leadership with the sciences, encouraged by the likes of Tom Peters, Stephen Covey and Deepak Chopra, resulted in leaders pursuing success, celebrity and perfection, as opposed to everyday effectiveness. This false ‘scientification’ of leadership culminated in competency models that valued theoretical rather than authentic talent. Leaders became self absorbed and prone to magical thinking.

Bones’ most withering prose is reserved for the ‘L’Oreal generation’ for whom consumption and success became something they were owed ‘because we’re worth it’; for them, being identified as top talent was seen as an essential lifestyle accessory. This ‘talent mindset’ made senior executives believe they were worth more than the capital invested by shareholders, led them to claim ‘outrageous levels of personal reward’, and yet gave them no sense of responsibility for society. Senior teams started behaving like a super race, believing they were the owners of the business, rather than stewards of others’ capital.

The solution, according to Bones, is to reform corporate governance structures so power is returned to the real owners of capital, adopt a collaborative leadership model focusing on the contribution of the many, rather than the few, cap senior executives’ earning potential relative to employees, and create values that are driven throughout the organisation.

While the book convincingly demolishes mainstream approaches to leadership, its assumptions are rooted in conventional business school thinking: that the leader’s prime task is to maximise shareholder wealth, and that organisations are ‘systems’ with machine-like characteristics that can be engineered. The leadership role is to control the organisation by building values, culture and aligned management systems. But the evidence of recent years suggests that none of these things confer control – leaders might be in charge, but ‘control’ remains illusory. Given recent scandals about the venal nature of many policy makers, the idea that it is our politicians, not our business leaders, who solely shoulder responsibility for achieving a more sustainable world, is unconvincing to say the least.

Bones’ onslaught on the narcissistic cult of the hero leader is long overdue, but his alternative proposition – of everyone being aligned and working to the corporate core purpose – risks losing individual identity through participation in the collective, and swapping one cult for another.