More Sketching... (thesis?)

Books used:

• Leadership James MacGregor Burns
• Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun James Robert Ph.D.

Notes and thoughts

Leadership book

Leaders do not shun conflict. they confront it, exploit it, ultimately embody it, they stand at points of contact amont latent conflict groups. so they're.. facilitators. how much of their personal influence are they able to use? how much do the followers buy of the leaders' opinions? The more homogeneous a group, the more the leader has to deal with other leaders of opposing groups. how does that change the balance? are the people better represented or worse? hmm. if "smaller" leaders arise out of homogeneous, that means less differing opinions and therefore stronger "factions." how does that change the question of conscience? does more diversity mean a shift in the conscience of the public as well? i guess for that to be true, we would have to assume that the public has more of a power over the conscience of a civilization rather than the leaders. the more heterogeneous the group, the more the leader must embrace competing interests and goals within their constituency. so in this case, the leader would most likely have to give in to more things that he doesn't necessarily advocate personally. which would mean that it is THIS kind of a society in which the actual public has more control over the conscience of the whole group. so we come back to the conclusion that leaders are (or should be) more facilitators than anything else. BUT, they can shape as well as express and mediate conflict. They can influence the intensity and scope of a conflict. Within limits, they can soften or sharpen demands and claims, amplify/mute the voice and pressure of certain groups. Conflict produces consciousness. in the fact that conflict often causes people to have to pick sides and decide what they want? But philosophers differ in opinion in answering the question, "consciousness of WHAT?" They differed in opinion as to the nature of the human needs. because leaders need to react to those needs. They agreed on the actual needs, but not how they are derived.

• Feuerbach: "humanity has real, solid needs derived from NATURE"
• Marx: "human consciousness = that of animals (which means there is no consciousness of the world as something objective and real apart from the animals' own needs and existence.) But human labor, rather than leading to direct satisfaction of a need, generates human consciousness and self-consciousness. so doing WORK in order to fulfill something other than an immediate, natural need sets us apart from other animals.
• Engel: railed at the "false consciousness" of feelings such as religion and nationalism
• Freud: focused mostly on the unconscious and said that it could be achieved through "psychic reality"
• Georges Sorel: "only through leadership and conflict (including "terrifying violence") could the working class become conscious of its true identity" could I relate this back to the 60's?? the Vietnam War? people witnessing terrifying violence and figuring out that that wasn't right and letting the leaders know what they thought. the protests, the hippies... that was America's identity of the time. at least a part of it. hm

"The first task of leadership is to bring to consciousness the
followers' sense of their own needs, values, and purposes..."

ex. the consciousness of an identity (sexual, communal, ethnic, class, national, ideological)

BRING to consciousness. so what is this?? it's the followers' needs and values and whatnot, but BROUGHT ABOUT by a leader? how do we know what's our own and what's the leader's? To what degree do leaders, through their command of personal influences, substitute their own motives and goals for those of thefollowers? what do they have to do? how do they differentiate between durable/valid and false/transient voices? leaders with RELEVANT goals and motives of their own respond to followers' needs, wants, and goals in such a way as to meet those motivations and to bring changes consonant with those of both leaders and followers with values of both.

Attila the Hun book - "The Art of Delegation"

-nation can't prevail as a dominant power if leadership is contained to a single person.

-leaders cannot accomplish for followers what the masses are not willing to accomplish themselves. ex. even with communist regimes, in the beginning, people follow willingly. they desire whatever their leaders are promising them - the pride, the nationalism, the 5year plans that are surely going to be a success.. basically, the leader andfollowers have to be in tune with one another.