An administrator sees an organization in terms of resources: measurable quantities of material at the disposal of an organization. An administrator is a What person, concerned with countable things.

A manager sees an organization in terms of work: goals, objectives, activities, tasks, cause, effect, effort and time. A manager is a How person.

A visionary sees the world in terms of meaning: the values that animate people from within and motivate them to contribute freely and to participate willingly in the life of the organization. A visionary is a Why person.

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Very few people simultaneously command all three dimensions, but out of the desire to feel individually complete and self-sufficient (from pride or fear of otherness) many people delude themselves into believing they are better equipped than they are to understand and command an organization without help from others.

“Help from others” means a person radically unlike yourself supplies something you essentially lack. You depend on another person to compensate for a genuine personal limit or incapacity. Most of us prefer to get assistance: to delegate something we could do ourselves to another person who has time or resources — or the inability to resist. We secretly think that if our organization were made up of clones of ourselves, we’d have a perfect organization.

While the belief that one is self-sufficient and complete in all three dimensions of leadership — What, Why and How — is not necessarily false, the self-sufficient leader is rare enough that claims of self-sufficiency should be assumed false until proven true.

The best leaders, whether they are most comfortable in the What, Why or How dimension of leadership are those who not only accept but actively seek out others who can do what they cannot do, who build alliances not with those like themselves but radically different from themselves, who desire nothing more than to help lead an organization that exceeds the scope of their own mastery to the greatest possible degree. A leader who can only feel comfortable leading what he has mastered has failed to master leadership.

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The problem of leadership is mutilated and oversimplified through invalidation and flattened through reductionism.

Invalidation is treating something as irrelevant, unnecessary, unworthy of concern, and perhaps even as bad:

• Administration is invalidated with words like: petty, base, pedantic, tedious, dry
• Management is invalidated with words like: constraining, linear, regimented, rigid, unfree
• Vision is invalidated with words like: subjective, fluffy, meaningless, bullshit

Reductionism involves collapsing one or two of the three dimensions into one of the others. Generally this happens innocently and without spite or aggression. A person for whatever reason simply does not see what is missing from his view. It is similar to color-blindness. The colors to which one is blind don’t look colorless — they just look like another color. Yellow and blue look the same, so until the blindness is discovered the difference is simply not there.

It is reductionism in action when administrators fail to understand that leadership involves a lot more than managing the organization’s resources. (The fact that most organizations call their employees “resources” is telling.) It is also common to see managers with no concept of inward motivation or values who believe it is their job to provide outward motivations (positive rewards, negative punishments) for conforming to the desires of the organization’s leadership. It doesn’t even occur to visionless leaders that their best employees are driven from within, and that to the degree that their inward motivations are connected with the goals of the organization, external motivations are superfluous (and often financially and spiritually expensive).

But with reductionism, nothing appears to be missing. (This is part of the phenomenon of the horizon.) Mere administrators “manage” by communicating expectations employees are expected to meet and by which they will be measured, and share a “vision” made up entirely of quantifiable success criteria. It’s not that these kinds of objectives are unimportant, but they should not be confused with management (which outlines a practicable how), or a vision (which makes people feel personally invested and inspired). Similarly, managers will tend to try to pass off practicable plans as vision, even when the plan is devoid of inspiration or moral value.

This is the root reason that business drains the essential meaning from every word it latches on to — levels them down and homogenizes them. The people who use and popularize them within organizations are often completely unaware of how much of words they miss. Once the words are drained of specificity they’re toothless at best and suspicious at worst.

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What is needed is for all leaders to question one of the most deeply-held American values: self-sufficiency. Self-sufficiency is not without value, but it has its time and its place. Self-sufficiency is of great value to isolated men or families pressing their way west through the wilderness. Self-sufficiency is king when the law is the law of the jungle.

But to the degree civilization has advanced, different values become (oddly) more valuable. Like it or not, that signals to us an undeniable higher and lower. Think about biology: an organism composed of barely-differentiated organelles swimming in a sack of proteins is lower than an earthworm, which is lower than a fish, which is lower than a dog, which is lower than a human being. The same is true for organizations. The parts become more differentiated, individuated — but at the same time also more interdependent.

(An analogy: does it matter that a Barbarian warrior can defeat a single Roman soldier when a Barbarian hoard clashes against a Roman phalanx? The Romans saw the problem of war very differently from the Barbarians, and for as long as Rome had enough of a sense of its Why that remained disciplined in its How and honest in its What the Barbarians were invariably trounced. Only when Rome lost its meaning and sunk into demagoguery, decadence and delusion did it become vulnerable to lower political orders.)

In civilizations, the capacity to make free alliances specifically with those different from oneself in order to extend the horizon of one’s own capabilities is what makes a man powerful. This is the trajectory of progress, from the lone man, to the clan of one’s own kind, to castes and subcastes, to universal unification of diversity within an ecumenical manifold.

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Let’s set aside the confusions of altruistic morality. Maybe there’s a metaphysical moral principle hovering beneath the world that somehow blesses the altruist in some unprovable way. Maybe there isn’t. But let’s concentrate on what is immediate and palpable: an organization that knows how to win the full, free cooperative participation of a diverse set of human beings with different talents, sensibilities and leadership instincts who allows each person to serve in his natural way, wasting neither the talent and energy of individuals, nor the resources of the organization in artificial motivations (rewards and punishments)… such an organization will prevail over homogeneous organizations with capabilities circumscribed by the type it employs and organization where the leadership unwittingly amputates the organization’s reach at the length of the leader’s own arm.