Last Saturday night, my husband & I managed to salvage some "couple time" from the long hours at work, and watched The Bridge on the River Kwai over dinner. (Sir) Alec Guinness' Colonel is supremely portrayed--indeed, so well that you find yourself in awe of his stubborn rectitude even as you increasingly despise his peremptory manner. (And, in my case, all without a single Obi-Wan Kenobi flashback, which is saying something, yo!)
But I digress. When it became obvious who was actually running the prison camp responsible for building said bridge, I thought (with inward cringing) "Gack--I wonder how many "leadership" books of the sixties and seventies cited this movie." But it wasn't until today that the full ridiculousness of citing fictional characters in managerial self-help books really clobbered me. (Btw: That also goes for books about leaders from "history" when documentation was too scanty for any serious analysis of character or managerial traits.)
So far as I'm concerned, there's absolutely no difference between "leadership" and raw charisma...until the leader wanna-be walks (or trips) into her/his very own flavor of Kobayashi Maru and leads the team out of it without coming unglued en route. Now, I'll cheerfully 'fess up to the fact that I (probably) haven't met my own Kobayashi Maru yet. But that doesn't stop me from expecting such from anyone who wants to wear the Leader Hat.
That, and they have to be non-fictional.
