In a 1977 Harvard Business Review article (reprinted in 1992), Abraham Zaleznik suggested leaders are simply different from managers just as managers are different from entrepreneurs. Leaders just think and act differently.  Retired basketball coach Bobby Knight would probably agree. When David Cawthon was teaching at Indiana University, he got Coach Knight to be a guest speaker in his management class. The topic was leadership. The day came. Coach Knight took the podium and spoke to the business students, “The first thing you people need to know about leadership is that most of you simply don’t have it in you.”

House and Baetz  several decades ago argued some individual differences should play a role in differentiating leaders. That is because leadership is a social process. It occurs with respect to others. Therefore people with great social skills or superb speakers are more likely to be seen as leaders. Who cannot listen to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech and not be moved.

But great leaders lead by the power of their ideas – and their ability to listen. In 1963 a church in Birmingham, Alabama, was bombed killing four young girls, all African-American. Prominent players of the Civil Rights Movement met in the home of the Rev. Ralph Abernathy. When Dr. King arrived, he sat on the sofa and listened to others arguing that they should meet violence with violence. Dr. King listened intently. After an hour he spoke and said this is not our way, not our path, not violence — but he had listened.  He was a great leader.


Zaleznik, A. (1992). Managers and leader: are they different? Harvard Business Review, 70 (2), 126-135. (Originally published 1977).

Cawthon, D.L. (1996). Leadership: the great man theory revisited. Business Horizons, May-June, 1-4 

House & Baetz. (1979). Leadership: Some empirical generalizations and new research directions. In B. M. Staw (Ed.), Rsearch in Organizational Behavior,1: 341-423. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.

 Story about Dr. King, Jr. Personal communication. Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth.  


Image from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AMartin_Luther_King%2C_Jr..jpg
By Nobel Foundation (http://nobelprize.org/) [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Decades ago while a U.S. Air Force Academy cadet, I participated in an intercollegiate debate at Royal Roads Military College near Victoria, Canada. The topic was about happiness.  The debate was cross-examination format. I do not recall most of the debate but I do remember one moment clearly.  I was cornered and at a loss for a response. I turned to my opponent and simply asked, “Are you happy?”  The gallery roared. Unknown to us as visitors but known to the cadets of this Canadian military college, my opponent had announced his resignation because the military life was not for him. He was not happy.

I was reminded of this incident while reading an article by Lyubomirsky and Layous in Current Directions in Psychological Science. These researchers wrote:

Happiness not only feels good, it is good. Happier people have more stable marriages, stronger immune systems, higher incomes, and more creative ideas than their less happy peers  . . . happiness is not merely a correlate or consequence of success but a cause of it . . . (p. 57)

Lyubomirsky and Layous reviewed research that indicates that we can increase our happiness “through simple intentional positive activities,” that there are activities, strategies that can effectively increase personal happiness. Here are some of the activities that have been demonstrated empirically to increase happiness:

-- writing letters expressing gratitude to someone
-- performing acts of kindness
-- counting your blessings, express in writing
-- build on your strengths, become even better at things you are good at
-- visualize a positive ideal of yourself in the future

Lyubomirsky and Layous comment that “all of these practices are brief, self-administered, and cost-effective” (p. 57).  They theorize a positive-activity model to guide further research. Here are some suggestions based on the research literature so far:

-- The best frequency for additional positive activities appears to be once a week.  Don't overdo. Optimal frequencies, however, can vary.
-- Writing letters of gratitude appears to be a good “starter” activity.
-- People who receive support from others while doing positive activities, “that’s nice of you to be doing that”, have more gains in happiness than those who do not.
-- Positive activities work best if you are committed and motivated to improving your happiness. 
-- Extraverts and people open to new experiences seem to benefit the most by engaging in positive activities.
--“To avoid adaptation, happiness seekers should vary their positive practices (which activities, how many, how often, and with whom)." (p. 61)

Researchers established years ago that happiness and personality were correlated. However this recent research clearly indicates we can choose to increase our level of happiness, regardless of where we start. Approach life positively. Do favors. Be appreciative. Be kind. Help others. Choose to be happy.

Lyubomirsky, S., & Layous, K.  (2013) How do simple positive activities increase well-being?  Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22 (1), 57-62.

Image of Royal Roads Military College from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Royal_Roads_Military_College_album.jpg
Used with permission, Creative Commons. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en 

We see the world and the workplace through a lens of masculinity-femininity. We may not realize that our perception of others in the workplace may be sex-typed. Sex-role stereotyping may disadvantage employees and the organization.

Read the following words and ask yourself which you think are more likely to describe men, which are more likely to describe women? Aggressive, works well with others, dynamic, good administrator, logical, perceptive, assertive, personable, forceful, tactful, true leader. For years I have used a longer version of this exercise in my introductory management course. Consistently most of my students see these words as mostly either masculine or feminine.

The effect of our masculinity-femininity lens can be subtle, easily missed, yet significant in impact. A supervisor can be fair in treatment, actively provide equal opportunity, and still manifest stereotypic tendencies without being aware of it. How? One example is performance appraisals. Analyses of key words, such as those just listed, in written performance appraisals sometimes show sex-role stereotypic traits. A male manager may be described as "a true leader", “dynamic”, “logical”, “assertive”,  “forceful”.  A female manager, viewed as equally effective, may be described as a “good administrator", "works well with others", “perceptive”, “personable”, “tactful”.  Somewhere from within us, the masculine and feminine traits we learned from our childhood may emerge in our writing (and sometimes our speech) unintentionally affecting the opportunities of others.  


Image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/ncngpao/8359944332/
Free to share:  http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/deed.en

John Naughton in The Observer, January 5, 2013, described the origins of the Pareto Principle as follows:

Back in 1906, an Italian engineer turned economist named Vilfredo Pareto made a startling discovery: 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. He studied land ownership patterns in a number of other countries and found that the same ratio applied. He also found that the ratio seemed to apply in other contexts: for example, 20% of the pea pods in his garden produced 80% of the peas. In the 1940s, an American engineer named Joseph Juran noticed that 80% of the quality problems in industrial mass-production systems seemed to come from 20% of the possible causes. He then stumbled on the work of Pareto and christened the 80/20 split the Pareto Principle in his honour.

Naughton’s account is a good summary. But Google “Pareto Principle” and you will find variations on its origins. In the interviews from “An Immigrant’s Gift,” Dr. Juran himself discussed how he discovered and named the Pareto Principle: 

JOSEPH JURAN:  Pareto was a real person. He was an 
Italian, an economist, an engineer. And one of the things he 
once did was to study the distribution of wealth in Italy. 
Well, of course, he found few families had most of the 
money and the rest of them didn't have much. Vital few, useful many -- if you want to use that 
term. That was my term, not his.

I first learned about him 
when I was visiting General Motors Corporation. (Someone) showed me something that 
he didn't show to very many visitors. He showed me a study 
he had made of the distribution of salaries in General Motors. 
And he had . . . found Pareto, and the 
logarithmic curve Pareto had developed fitted the General Motors thing.  And we discussed that. I checked his mathematics. . . .We couldn't do anything 
like that in Western Electric. But the name "Pareto" I latched 
onto. Put that in my memory in case I ever needed it.

Well, soon after that I did need it . . . When I was (working on) the Quality Control Handbook, I needed a shorthand name for a 
phenomenon that when you got a lot of different defects 
of ilk. You produced something and got a lot of things the matter with it. Maybe a hundred different diseases of that 
product. But, when you look at the frequency of each disease . . . like the mortality tables, a few diseases account 
for most of the sickness. Well, not only there, you've got 
absenteeism. A few people account for most of the absences. 
A few people account for most of the accidents, et cetera.

There's a universal situation there, that in a total amount of effect, a relative few of the causes account for 
most of the effect. I needed a shorthand name for that. And
 then I remembered Pareto. Now, he hadn't generalized this
principle. He was just studying wealth. But I adopted the 
name. I wasn't willing to call something like that the Juran 
Principle. (I am) not structured that way. So, to my knowledge, I'm the first one that 
generalized that. And that was the birth of the Pareto 
Principle.  
 

Image of Vilfredo Pareto from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vilfredo_Pareto.jpg with permission.

More from the files of the Dr. Juran "An Immigrant's Gift" Archival Project, research and dissemination of information from the interviews conducted about Joseph Juran for the PBS Special, An Immigrant's Gift.

From interviews with Dr. Joseph Juran and his brother Nathan. Nathan (with Richard Day and Thomas Little) won the Academy Award for Best Black-and-White Art Direction – Interior Decoration in 1942 for How Green Was My Valley, directed by John Ford. The interview with Joe Juran was conducted on May 2, 1991, in Wilton, Connecticut. The date for the interview with Nathan is not certain but most probably the summer of 1991.

The interviewer was asking Dr. Juran about his motivation to eliminate errors in the workplace -- but the topic became Dr. Juran’s passion for chess. 

QUESTION: Was (your motivation) the end result of eliminating errors, or was it the mental challenge of finding errors?

JOSEPH JURAN:  It was the mental challenge. I think that goes back for many years. My way of dealing with challenges . . . Playing little games, I could beat (others) at checkers or whatever. . . I loved to win. I was structured that way and that tended to force me, or lure me, into activities where the analytical mind I had  . . . would show up. I'd have then the self-respect that goes with being a winner. I had a bottomless appetite for that sort of thing.

And along came something that made a major change.  A neighbor taught me to play chess. Within a matter of weeks he couldn't touch me. He wasn't structured that way, and I was. I was a freshman in college at that time. In my sophomore year I became the college chess champion, and stayed that way the rest of my time.

Now that was a tremendous thing, to me. In world affairs, it's not a big deal to be a college chess champion but to me it was an enormous thing, because in a place like the university, the chess champion has a high status . . . my grades were mediocre. I didn't spend enough time studying, but they looked up to the fact this guy's the college chess champion. The faculty looked up to it.

But this was part of the same thing--here was a game that required a great deal of analysis, and you've got to do in a very short time, and the top chess player can run through many more combinations in a short time mentally than his competitors. Speed is one of the big elements of that although many people don't realize it.  I mean they see players sitting there and nobody's moving and cobwebs are starting to collect—they think it's an awfully dull game. If they could watch the pieces move as fast as they're being visualized by the players, there'd be a blur.

NATHAN JURAN: We used to play chess when we slept in the same bed, Joe and I, after the lights were out. We didn't have many lights in those days. But, when the lights were out, and everything was dark, we'd play chess just by visualizing the board and call out the moves, see? But after maybe, six or eight moves, I'd be lost, but Joe knew exactly where every piece was. So he always won.

My Take-Away:

Google “leadership” and “chess” and you may be surprised at the results: Martin Stem’s “The Effects of Chess on Leadership”, Carol Goman’s “Leadership is Like a Game of Chess”, Gregorio Bituin, Jr.’s, Chess and Leadership. Bituin wrote, “A chess player requires making a decisive move in a very complex situation and under time pressure.” These writers draw parallels between the lessons and skills honed playing chess, much like Joseph Juran, and the qualities needed in leaders.

Many academic papers have been written about chess players and how the best may be different, psychologically or physiologically. I have found none that specifically focused on leadership and chess. However, Unterrainer and colleagues reported an experimental study comparing chess players and non-chess players on planning abilities. On measures of intelligence, the chess players and non-chess players were the same. Using the Tower of London cognitive test, they found chess players had superior planning abilities, especially on more difficult problems. They made fewer unnecessary moves on the test.

Stanley Kubrick, the great film director, on chess: “You sit at the board and suddenly your heart leaps. Your hand trembles to pick up the piece and move it. But what chess teaches you is that you must sit there calmly and think about whether it's really a good idea and whether there are other, better ideas.”

Does playing chess make better leaders? An empirical question -- but my guess would be probably so.  

Unterrainer, J. M., Kaller, C. P., Halsband, U., & Rahm, B. (2006). Planning abilities and chess: A comparison of chess and non-chess players on the Tower of London task. British Journal of Psychology, 97(3), 299–311

Kubrick quotation from http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/chess.html#qGC7Pv5uEFZfxdUk.99 


Image of my chess set, a wedding gift from my wife.