Leadership 101

"Can Leadership Be Taught?" by Peter Coy, in Cornell Magazine (Nov.–Dec. 1998), Cornell Alumni Federation, 55 Brown Rd., Ithaca, N.Y. 14850–1247. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tired of hearing how their graduates excel as analysts but are lacking in the right stuff as future captains of industry, more and more of the nation’s business schools are trying to teach that elusive quality called leadership.

One sign of the swelling interest was the emergence of an academic journal on the subject, the Leadership Quarterly, now a decade old. In 1994, the Harvard Business School launched a required leadership course for its first-year students. Other top business schools also have established leadership programs.

"The problem for scholars is that as a rigorous science, leadership ain’t physics," notes Coy, an associate economics editor of Business Week. "For starters, like pornography, it resists definition." Leaders come in all shapes and sizes—pacifistic or warlike, idealistic or cynical, cerebral or intuitive. Nor is any particular style of leadership guaranteed to work. "Al Dunlap was a big success with his slash-and-burn tactics at Scott Paper," Coy observes, "but flopped when he tried the same thing at Sunbeam."

Randall S. Peterson, of Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management, cites research showing that the CEO’s personality seems to explain less than one-tenth of the variation in a company’s performance. However, the boss may have a considerable indirect impact. In a paper last year, Peterson and two co-authors examined Coca-Cola, IBM, and seven other big companies that had done well under certain CEOs and poorly under others. They concluded that the CEO’s personality affects the "group dynamics" of top management, which in turn affects profits.

That seems something that future CEOs should know, but, like most theoretical findings in this field, it obviously leaves a great many questions about leadership unanswered; for example, what is it about a CEO’s personality that matters, and how do you teach it?

Given this void, many business schools are concentrating their "leadership" efforts not on academic inquiry but on skills training. Picking up that cue, business schools simu-Students themselves often say they learned late situations that demand leadership and more about leadership from being in a crisis invite students to rise to the occasion. Just of some sort than from any academic course. like in the real world.