Leadership, Philosophy of Sports, and Management

Professor: Rahul Gupta Choudhury

Area of Specialization: Marketing, Strategy and General Management

Sports and games are almost as old as civilization itself. A philosophical perspective on sports incorporates its metaphysical relationships with art and play, ethical issues of virtue and fairness, and are, more broadly, socio-political. The birthplace of ancient philosophy as well as the Olympic sport is widely believed to be in ancient Greece. This form of human activity flourished during the time frame commonly known as the Hellenistic period. This period consists of three centuries of Greek history largely around the Mediterranean region. These three centuries started with the death of the Macedonian king Alexander the Great in 323 B.C.E. and the rise of Augustus in Rome in 31 B.C.E. The emergence of the Roman empire started here. This was signified by the Battle of Actium in 31 B.C.E. and the conquest of Ptolemaic Egypt in the subsequent year. The Ptolemaic, who were of Macedonian Greek royal origin, was the last dynasty of Egypt. Since Alexander the Great did not have any clear line of succession, the top generals of his army carved out a kingdom each for themselves. However, at that time, the area under the control of the Greeks was very large and hence their influence spread far and wide – right up to India. This resulted in more cultural exchanges which further leads to diversity and cosmopolitanism. People developed a sense of purpose and belonging and as a result of this, philosophy and other intellectual pursuits developed in great strides. For the people, this provided a means to explore one’s emotions and an urge to see the world, and hence an urge to improve themselves continuously. The Hellenistic philosophies believed that those who are good at sports are also good leaders. The sport was seen as an epistemic inquiry. That means it was perceived as a foolproof method where the athletic capabilities of the athletes were objectively judged through athletic competitions.  It had other interpretations and other utilities which may be discussed later. The culture of sports was so ingrained in Greek culture that even Homer wrote about it in his Games of Phaeacians in Odyssey. Now, Historians have many different versions of Homer, his life, and his body of work. It is believed that Homer was born in Anatolia (Asia Minor) in present-day Turkey. He is widely credited with the authorship of the two epic poems Iliad and Odyssey. These two poems had a profound influence on Western arts, film, literature, and music. Some of the greatest works in Western civilization have been inspired by him. Even Dante Alighieri called him the king of all poets. Iliad is all about the Trojan war where the city of Troy (in present-day Turkey) was under a ten-year siege by the coalition of Mycenaean Greek kingdoms. Mycenaean Greece spanned from 1750 to 1050 BC. It represents the first advanced and distinctively Greek civilization in mainland Greece. Trojan war or the siege of Troy was done when Paris of Troy took Helen from the king of Sparta, her husband Menelaus. This is one of the most important events in Greek mythology. There was a quarrel between King Agamemnon (brother of Menelaus) and the warrior Achilles (the hero) for a few weeks in the last year of the war and the Iliad is focused on that. After the fall of Troy, Odysseus (Ulysses in Latin), King of Ithaca, goes on a ten-year journey back home. The poem Odyssey is all about King Odysseus and his journey back home. 

The sport was practiced for a large number of reasons in ancient times. Among them, the most prominent factors were amusement, religious worship, and political stability. Ancient Sumerians, Egyptians, the Greeks as well as the Romans played sports to prepare for war. The significant impact of sport on the body and mind of people was very well understood at that time also. The flourishing civilizations through medieval times till modernity has understood the significance of sports and their role in character building. Even Vivekananda stressed the role of physical education in the lives of individuals as well as that of the community and the nation-state. This positive attitude towards sports exists in human civilization through the ages irrespective of religious beliefs and other important thought processes and outcomes of those times. Although sports are as old as human civilization, the philosophy of sports is a comparatively new area that was revived during the 20th century. For Paul Weiss, who is largely credited with the resuscitation of the world’s interest in the philosophy of sports, sports are not only about examining the principles of sports but that must be pertinent to all other fields – particularly to the ‘whole of things and knowledge. The growth of the study of the philosophy of sports in modern times happened in three phases. In the first phase, interestingly, the philosophy of sports was initially a part of the philosophy of education wherein sports were considered a form of play. The central point was that sports were seen as an activity that prepared individuals for ‘the good life. So, they believed that physical education should become an integral part of overall human education. The next phase saw the advent of more emphasis on systems of philosophy. In this phase, the dependence of the study of the philosophy of sports on science and pedagogy was reduced and the entire approach was augmented to broaden the base of the study further – thus including cultural and historical dimensions to the study of the philosophy of sports. This field of study took a turn towards practicality in the 1990s. However, the question as to what the necessary and sufficient conditions are to be termed as sports remain. This has become even more pertinent today with the advent and widespread usage of digital games. So, the studies moved towards the normative issues and tried to rely more on the concept of ‘social practice’. The emphasis was more on the ‘lived experiences of the participants and the common traits of all sporting activities were to be identified – from the good and the excellent to the ethical questions that sporting events sometimes brought to the front. In modern times, other related questions are being debated about sports. This includes the aesthetic quality of sports, the experiences of the practitioners as well as spectators, as well as sports as a form of art and how are the two related. 

Theories of the philosophy of sports are of two types – descriptive and normative. Descriptive theories, as the name suggests, describe the concepts of sports as it exists. Normative theories, on the other hand, talk about sports as they should be. Again, normative theories are of two types – externalist and internalist. Externalist theories think of sports as part of the larger society. It deals with the influence of concepts and principles of other areas that influence sports. Externalist theories are of three types – commodification theory, new left theory, and hegemony theory. In commodification theory, sport is seen as just another commodity and the economic profit that it generates is the main principle. They think that sport does not have any intrinsic characteristics worth protecting. The new left theories approach sports by their capacity to reproduce social history through the connection between sports, labor, and the economy. Hegemony theories are more about the influence of cultural practices on the practices of sports keeping in mind the role that human beings play in this process. So, as stated earlier, externalism always compares a sport with external factors like social and historical concepts and influences. They think of sports only in instrumental terms. Internalist theories, however, think that sports have an intrinsic value. It is a practice that stands on its own and has distinctive values and internal logic. Sport is non-instrumental and internalist theories always try to find out an intrinsic normative principle of sport. So, they try to develop principles and practices of sports along with appropriate standards of conduct. Internalist theories are of three types – formalism, conventionalism, and broad internalism or interpretivism. According to the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, formalism conceives of sport as constituted solely by written rules: a sport is just the set of written rules that govern it. Bernard Suits, a formalist, argues that every game has four things – goals, means, rules, and a certain attitude among the game players. Goals can be of two types – lusory and pre-lusory. Pre-lusory means anybody can partially do what the game requires without playing the game. Lusory goals mean that one has to play the game to win. Then, every game defines the means which can be adopted to achieve the pre-lusory goals and it is purposefully inefficient. You cannot score a goal in soccer by carrying the ball in your hands. So, what is permitted is lusory and what is not permitted is illusory. Every game has rules, and the players have to follow those rules. Rules allow certain means to be adopted in the game and disallow others because it is necessary to have obstacles in the game. Also, the players must commit to playing the game in accordance with the rules of the game. Otherwise, the game cannot be played. Discussions and debates are still on as to the nature of the rules – i.e., some rules are constitutive while others are regulatory. Then there is the question of which sports qualify as games and which ones do not. This is because sports like chess etc. do not need any physical skills and thus, according to traditional definition, is not a game. So, according to many theorists, some sports are performances and not games. According to the definitions, the game stops as soon as a player or group of players breaks a rule. However, methods and rules are available to restart the game and hence that sport qualifies as a game. The formalists remind us that games are made by humans for humans. So, the obstacles, resistances or challenge in the game has to be just right such that the players or the individuals do not lose interest in the game. Conventionalism goes one step further than formalism. They contend that it is not only written rules, constitutive or regulative, that forms or runs a game. There are many unwritten rules in a game which are better known as conventions – and these conventions make the game complete in some form. It is these conventions which constitute the ‘ethos’ of the game. So, ethos of the game is “set of unofficial, implicit conventions which determine how the rules of a game are to be applied in concrete circumstances”. The criticism of this theory is that there is a possibility that some not so good conventions may also become normative. To counter this, conventionalists brought in the concept of surface conventions and deep conventions. One has to keep in mind that amateurs play the game not for any instrumental reasons, but the professionals play the game for the instrumental reason of earning money. Broad internalism or Interpretivism accepts the definitions and explanations of formalists and conventionalists but adds that it is not sufficient to explain away a game only by its rules and conventions. According to the founders of Interpretivism, underlying intrinsic principles in addition to rules and conventions are a very important constituent of games. Intrinsic principles, according to them, ‘provide the foundation for interpreting or understanding sport practices.’ The rules and conventions have to be interpreted and applied in such a way that the normative principles are promoted, and this then determine the point of the practice. This is very similar to law, where many a times, the laws have to be interpreted according to the underlying intrinsic principles. So, the saying goes – ‘’in letter and spirit”.                          

Now, broad internalist theory is divided into the following three categories: contractualism, the ‘respect for the integrity of the game’ account, and mutualism. Contractualism means that sport can only happen when it is a social contract among the participants primarily to obey the rules and conventions as well as the underlying principles of the game. “Respect for the integrity of the game” means that the game may have a separate interest than the interest of the players. For example, the Brazilians call soccer – ‘Jogito Bonita’ – the beautiful game. Great players like Pele, Maradona and many others have played the game according to their interest. Sometimes it is for winning for their country and sometimes it is winning for their clubs. The game still goes on and is improving day by day with the aim of becoming more beautiful and providing entertainment to the millions of fans worldwide. The Brazil soccer team is known and admired for the ‘’artistic’’ way they play the game. European teams concentrate on more scientific approach to the game. However, irrespective of their styles, all the participants satisfy the interests of the game as well as their own, including their club and/or country. So, the game itself is an ‘’intrinsically valuable entity’’. In the mutualist view, Robert L. Simon defines sporting competition as “mutually acceptable quest for excellence through challenge”. John S. Russell defines sport as “….. rules should be interpreted in such a manner that the excellences embodied in achieving the lusory goal of the game are not undermined but are maintained and fostered”. Mutualists do not quite favour the excessive drive for winning. According to them, in that case, sports become a zero-sum game. This is because only the victor benefits from the game. This is the ‘winner takes all’ situation. There is, however, situations in sports as well as in life where ‘winner loses all’. According to mutualists, sports should be a non-zero-sum game where both the victors and the vanquished benefit – all participants benefit from participation only. Many people view as striving for individual victory. Mutualists, however, believe that cooperative excellence is the goal of sports. Each participant pushes the other participant for excellence and that is the expected normative behaviour appropriate for sports. So, excellence is the main goal irrespective of winning or losing. Cooperation is the operative word. The mutualists think that goods connected to winning is external to the practice, whereas goods connected to excellence are internal to the practice.

According to Aristotle, ‘’sport contributes and must contribute to the excellence of man – who, for him, is necessarily a citizen – and anything that he believes can harm such excellence is rejected’’. In Plato’s view, “good sport is the sport directed toward the fulfilment of self, all the way to the ideal – the idea itself. And only sport like that can bring true contentment to the human – the reasonable being’’. Plato connects the goodness of sport with the human soul. He divides the soul into three stages. The first part of the soul corresponds with the lowest stage of sport. The first part of the soul is the appetite soul. This stage which is the lowest stage when the goal is to gain material goods through prizes won at competitions. The second part of the soul is the emotional soul. This corresponds to the second stage of sports where it is based on agon (ancient Greek word for competition). The goal here is to attain fulfilment by winning – winning honour and glory. The third part of the souls is known as the reasonable soul. This is the greatest part of the soul which corresponds to the best stage of the goodness of sport. This is all about achieving perfection. Competition with others is not necessary in this stage. Fulfilment is obtained through perfect execution of movement or exercise. In this stage, there is perfect cooperation between body and soul (reason). It is in this stage that sports try to win over self, which is the most difficult. Like Aristotle said elsewhere that he ‘’counts him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victory is over self”. So, Plato is of the opinion that in the last stage sport goes beyond the physical world - the physical dimensions of time and space. In this phase, sport touches the ‘’everlasting and unchangeable world of ideas’’. So, according to the ancient Greek philosophers’ sport can be used as a ‘’means for philosophical investigation of humans and the world’’. 

From the earlier discussions it is quite clear that there are lot of similarities between sports and management, especially business management. Management has, over the years, imbibed a lot from sports - such that there is now a complete course on sports management. Once a person joins the corporate sector, his appetite soul is more prevalent. The young man is continuously learning - and dreaming of a bright future when he can earn more money and better the standard of living of his family. This keeps him going to the second stage where he starts competing in the internal environment of the company. He wants to get promotions and go up the ladder fast. Once he achieves that, he goes on to the third stage of the reasonable soul. This is where he has his chance of attaining perfection or self-actualization in his field. He is probably fulfilled and satisfied with the progress he has made in his career and life. This is the time for him to celebrate. However, there is a saying that the happiest moments of a person’s life are also his saddest. So, when he looks back and takes a hard look at the previous decades of his life, several questions crop up. The first reaction is – is it all that there is to life? Is it worth the effort and sacrifice of an entire lifetime? Or is it just another rule of life that you have to go through anyway? In the absence of a better alternative, this is what comes to, in the end. Whether in sport, or in life, or in management – the crossroads appear very frequently. One has to be very decisive at those points and take fast, sometimes split- second decisions. The way to understand all three is that if one is able to achieve fulfilment and reach the ideal and become the ideal – then you have carried out God’s will. Fulfilment in our work life as well as our personal life is very important to achieve as it opens the doors for further self-fulfilment in spiritual terms and thus attains victory over self. This selfless stage is when his life is complete, and he enters the world of ideas and probably be able to guide others in their journey of life in a detached fashion. All this is not so easy, and neither is it as difficult as it sounds. Many people before have travelled this path and they will be remembered forever. As Aristotle said: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit”.    

Just like sports, corporates and their managers role in these corporate entities are guided by rules and regulations, conventions, and some underlying principles. Corporates and their managers work with the explicit instrumental reason of making profits thus earning more money for themselves as well. The corporates also make it clear that the overall remuneration of executives is dependent on how much profits they are able to generate. So, excellence, as Aristotle said, is not an ingrained objective of the corporate. It is only the super successful organizations like Apple, Microsoft, and Google etc. that practice excellence in whatever they do. Most other corporations are in optimal mode. Most managers also take the queue from these entities. Participation does not have any value. You have to be a winner is the moto. This is insufficient for proper contribution to society and maybe even to the organization itself. This lack of understanding of the intrinsic value of business makes the business itself as well as their managers just another commodity which survives on the basis of transactions. This transaction approach is spoiling the potential of the companies to make any meaningful contribution to the society it belongs to. The commodification of the human resources by these large organizations and a few so-called ‘leaders’ of corporates is the gravest danger facing the business world today. The first purpose of business is to understand its intrinsic value and to identify which are the intrinsic characteristics worth protecting and nurturing. It is not easy to separate the business from the external social and historical antecedents. However, it is very much required that the business is run on cultural factors which develops an intrinsic normative principle. Most business goes along with what exists – but the question should be what is it supposed to be? What should be the norms of the management principles being practiced by the organization? It is always the strength of the internal factors of the firm that determines the means, the goals, and the final achievements of the organization. External factors may affect but will be limited in scope if the internal strength of the company is high. Similar is the situation with managers. The managers today are far more oriented towards instrumentality but does not give much credence to normative behaviour. They are only concerned about achieving the lusory goals which off course has a reward in the end. Just imagine how much better our organizations would have been if the managers focused on excellence instead of winning the game with the competitors – both, within and outside. This is where culture comes in and super successful organizations had leaders who could inculcate the habit of excellence, in contrast to just winning, in the managers and other relevant stakeholders. It is easy to understand that if you are able to produce excellence through cooperation and collaboration, you will definitely win irrespective of whether you have competition or not. It is not difficult to see in many organizations that rules, and policies are made not to facilitate or motivate all the people but are formulated in the interest of a selected few. In this process, people who do not belong to the ‘’right’’ group, will just be used irrespective of the contribution s/he has made to the organization. Here, implementation of the rules and policies are to be done in letter and spirit, otherwise it is perceived as – ‘’show me the face and I will show you the policy’’. Organizations are selfish entities and understands only its self-interest. Managers fall in line sooner or later. Good managers, like good sportsperson, know what Homer Rice says – “You can motivate by fear, and you can motivate by reward. But both those methods are only temporary. The only lasting thing is self-motivation”. Here, the superordinate goal or the big picture is very relevant and important. So, in the final analysis, it is not about winning, but all about excelling – and it is not about competition, but all about cooperation and collaboration. The world is moving that way. This will throw up a lot of questions especially when viewed in the perspective of geo-politics, and this may be discussed later in another forum. One will do well to remember what Ronda Rousey said – “Once you give them the power to tell you you’re great, you’ve also given them the power to tell you you’re unworthy. Once you start caring about people’s opinions of you, you give up control.”

In philosophy, the logical certainty of truth and knowledge like that of mathematics or science, is absent. Similarly, it is not about subjective preferences and hence, it is not about personal likes and dislikes. So, it is about arguments and reasoning which is better accepted compared to alternative arguments or reasoning. This discussion is from the first chapter (Tim Elcombe) of the book ‘’Philosophy of Sport: International Perspectives’’ by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Leadership plays a central role in sports – quite like business management. Leadership, of course, is also very relevant in other spheres of study like education, politics etc. – but most of the discussions pertaining to leadership emanates from business management. After the Indian cricket team won the world cup, M S Dhoni was invited by many corporate entities to give them some insights into his leadership style. This exchange of ideas on leadership between business management and sports is an ongoing process which is in vogue for quite a long time. However, despite the long tradition, there does not exist any single definition of leadership which is acceptable to everybody. Like someone said – there is as many definitions of leadership as experts who tried to define it. Various top sports personalities in the world have written books on leadership and there is one point which all of them agree upon. The point is that the leadership theories applicable to sports is also applicable to business management. Effective leadership styles vary widely and so simplification of the concept through a simple cause-effect relation is not possible while defining leadership. John Dewey says that when attempts are made to explain leadership in mechanical cause-effect relationship, we fall into the trap of the ‘’business mind’’ which is an outcome of the prevailing value standards resulting from economic prosperity. The Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul terms it as ‘’corporatism’’, which, according to him, emanates from value-based ‘’commitment to efficiency and accumulation through specialization’’. This then percolates into all forms of our culture – sport, education, politics etc. The result of this corporatist mentality of leadership is to be incapable of acting consistently in a way that makes a difference. Keeping this in the background, Charles Taylor identifies three “cultural malaises” of the modern society. The first problem before mankind is that subjectivism is taking deep roots in our society. Subjectivism prevents society and their individuals to attain the goal of “finding one’s own original way of being” and hence the social quality of individual existence suffers. Cultures and societies have to respect and recognise the quality of individual existence. This has to be accomplished through relationship and dialogues against the backdrop of a shared “horizon of significance”. The second problem is that the society and its culture lives for amoral reasons with a reductive instrumental (corporatist) mentality. We have deviated from the understanding that it is the moral ideals which fund the culture of societies and like ancient Greek philosophers said, the world of ideas. It has to be clearly understood that ultimately it is the overall culture that drives societies and hence has a very big impact on the outcomes of the societal activities. The third malaise, arising out of the first two, is the fragmentation of society. The result is that radicalism takes root in the society which leads the people towards an apathetic mentality towards their own society or community. Since proper communication channels for dialogue is virtually blocked, the legal process takes precedence over other institutions. This winner-take-all situation in society leads to utilitarian majoritarianism where a significant part of the society becomes spectators believing that their opinions and ideas do not matter. This is the genesis of cultural fragmentism of a society. No matter what we say, the underlying principle of sports as well as business management is that of extreme individualism. This has percolated to all other fields as well. This radically individualistic approach sounds almost like narcissism and the real cause behind this is the concept of rejection of the moral ideals which drives the culture of the society. All of us now are obsessed with ‘success’ – whatever that means – and has pushed excellence to the backburner.

While these observations are interesting especially in the light of what is happening in our society today, there are certain philosophers called ‘pragmatists’ who has given some more interesting explanations and point-of-views to counter the original viewpoints. According to them the slide to subjectivism is not correct as our social entity is firmly rooted and is much more significant than the fact that we are all living and working in proximity of each other. As Stuhr writes, “existence is social in a deeper, ontologically more important sense as well; the individual is intrinsically constituted by and in his or her social relations; the self is fundamentally a social self.” So, the idea of ‘living a good life’ may vary from individual to individual, but this human flourishing cannot be achieved without the transactions and exchanges with other people. This objective of the good life cannot be achieved individually at all. Simultaneously, each and every individual is a member of multiple cultures. The individual is continuously shaped by and is also continuously shaping each culture. So, the horizon of significance is developed and transformed individually as well as collectively. In sports as well as in other spheres of life, cooperation precedes competition. The football team has to gel well together before they participate in a major competition and face their opponents who has also gone through the process of team building based on cooperation and collaboration. So, the social quality of our existence is irreducible. The shared horizons of significance should and does emerge from our lived experiences. The view of the pragmatists is that culture is formed by ‘moral habits’. It is moral habits that form and define culture. The moral habits are an outcome of the values and ideas about their world. Ideas can change the world, and everybody can attempt to make things better by transforming ideas that shape our culture. So, it is not entirely about corporatism that is shaping culture through instrumentalism. It is not about reductive cost-benefit analysis, but about ideas which has the potential power to create tangible growth for real change. So, we have to work towards ideas for cultural transformation and change our moral and cultural habits – and not encourage work for instrumentalism. According to the pragmatists, the answer to cultural fragmentation is democracy. Democracy is the starting point for the good life. This is a system where people realize their human meaning of life. However, democracy here is not restricted to the democratic political system which is perceived as simple, utilitarian, and divisive majority rules system. Dewey defines democracy as “having a responsible share according to the capacity in forming and directing the activities of the groups to which one belongs and in participating according to need in the values which the groups sustain.” The exact application of these theories in real life situations may be difficult, but it is under these conditions that people will live the ’good life’, which also means creating opportunities for growth and human flourishing.

Before we move on to the concept of leadership directly, let us summarize what we discussed in the earlier paragraphs. The three malaises of the society are radical self-interest, reductive instrumentalism, and socio-political disengagement. According to Taylor, these malaises further lead to corporatist, reductive, cause-effect, specialized, and stagnant models of leadership. What is important is the belief in the social quality of our being, the belief that it is our moral habits that funds our culture which is being defined by us and is also simultaneously defining our existence.

Keeping this in context leadership may be defined as “intelligent, purposeful activities that create the conditions for cultural growth”. So, according to this definition, anyone who intentionally creates the condition for a culture and its members to grow is providing leadership. It is necessary for a leader to not only understand the major issues and motivators in a culture, but to also understand and moderate the moral values which actually created the culture. These moral values have to re-interpreted and re-constructed to create conditions for growth within and outside the culture. It is not necessary for a person to be in positions of power or authority in order to provide leadership and bring in growth in a culture. Others down the line, who do not even hold that position, may also be able to create that which in consonance with other similar creations will be able to make a big impact on the culture and the moral ideals which creates and defines the culture. This is a positive change which is being done through a method which is genuinely democratic as all the members in the culture accept the interpretation of the moral ideals transforming the culture. So, Saul is of the opinion that leaders ‘’look at things everyone else sees and then see them in a new light whereby an answer becomes obvious”. So, leadership is central to a democracy. Genuine leadership mobilize people around them and protects them from either being manipulated by large bureaucracies or imposition of the values on them by those in power. This happens because individuals, cultures, and democracies are perennially evolving. The best way is to have a continuous dialogue, which is critical and reconstructive in nature, about the moral ideals and the direction in which the culture of the society needs to be guided. Now, to ensure growth, all leadership acts must be moral and growth, according to the pragmatists, is the moral end. Then only is the good life possible. This good life is about the best and most meaningful experiences through our activities possible. The moral and ethical leadership must be aware of the pitfalls of modern corporatist activities in utilitarian democracies. What happens in modern utilitarian democracies is best said by Stuhr: “manipulate one another, like machines, paying no attention to the quality of experience of others”. The moral or ethical leader must create opportunities for growth longitudinally (inside the society or culture) or laterally (outside the society or culture). Dewey introduced the concept of “Great Community” where the potential of all members of the community is realized. This should happen while the individual as well as all the activities are in tune with the common good and common interest. Now, every member in a community is also members of other groups and so, in order to achieve this end, the groups must interact with each other fully. There have been leaders in human history who have transformed societies and cultures but has hindered and negatively impacted the growth of other societies and cultures. This has resulted in further fragmentation of the wider society thus dismantling genuine democracy. During these periods, the opportunities for growth or for human flourishing has gone down drastically – sometimes just vanished. These leaders, like Hitler, had brought in devastation for the larger societies even though he was quite popular in his culture and society in the beginning. These leaders will obviously not qualify as genuine leaders.

No leader whether in politics, or sports, or education, or business management can reach this ideal state easily. It is also a work in progress as cultures and democracies as well as individuals are. The point here is what does the leader have in his mind – is the creation of the normative democratic culture a goal at the top of his mind? Most managers and sportspersons are more occupied with the technicalities and managing or achieving the immediate objectives. Very few of them understand and talk about culture. The appreciation of culture as a foundation for long-term sustainability is not much discussed about – it is definitely not a top of the mind agenda. Here, particularly in reference to India and business management, there is a very high chance that people will confuse ‘work culture’ with culture. This is where one needs to be careful. Culture encompasses all facets of a society – the total sets of activities, events, the rules and policies, the conventions, and the underlying principles as well. It is much larger than the sum of all its parts put together and is obviously very multi-dimensional in its composition. It is this culture which delivers results for the society and takes it on the growth trajectory. The challenge is the formulation of the moral ideals that fund culture and since both are not reducible, it becomes difficult for easy visualization. The solution is to formulate the normative principles and definitely stay away from instrumentality or as the philosophers said – the corporatism of moral ideals and culture. So, leadership is about transformation of moral ideals and the consequent culture which creates condition for growth. Management is about implementation of policies pertaining to the ideals of a culture. Leadership has to overcome the natural tendency of creative inertia and get into action that provides direction to the society and the culture.

Ushering in these changes in culture and society is far more difficult than it sounds. At any point in time, the changes required are very high and we want to almost wish away the challenges. That is unlikely to wield any result. So, what is required is to make a micro roadmap by breaking down the large issues into smaller doable goals and objectives. There is always a tendency among individuals or managers to make a big change at one go. History has taught us that very few grand projects have really succeeded in achieving their objectives. In the last century, Mao Tse Tung of China succeeded in his ‘long march’ and then his ‘cultural revolution’. The amount of bloodshed and the price the Chinese people have paid for that is beyond all calculations. However, China shut themselves off from the rest of the world and were able to bring in major changes in their society and culture. That also took almost four decades. This is not replicable in any other modern society in today’s world. The likes of Che Guevara have tried this on a much smaller scale and has succeeded in a limited scale. There is no question of modern vibrant democratic societies like India to take that path. So, it is always better to break down the huge challenges of cultural changes into smaller steps which add up to the solutions for the big challenge – and this will very obviously take decades (hopefully not centuries). Speed is not a criterion here – what is important is that the foundation of change is so solid that it can take on a lot of turbulence and unforeseen circumstances in the decades to come. The leadership will have to be clear that this process will bring in spectacular failures – but the successes will also be humongous and very satisfying for all the members of the culture and society. To quote Michael Jordan: “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” The organization embarking on this journey will have to be clear that there are no benchmarks in this exercise. We have to find our own unique path and so innovations and creativity will be the drivers of this journey – this is because the internal culture (and moral ideals) and the external challenges are different for each organization. Following other companies and their processes will not help at all as the first requirement of bringing in cultural changes is to understand ourselves first. Eulogising ourselves and being overtly critical of others will be a vain attempt to pass on the responsibilities of change to some outside third parties. No, that is not going to work. In the words of Kobe Bryant: “I don’t want to be the next Michael Jordan; I only want to be Kobe Bryant”.  

In every sphere of life irrespective of the field (education, business management, sports, or politics), the challenges are huge and varied. Newer and newer challenges crop up as the journey goes on. Like we say in business management – the seeds of tomorrows failures are in today’s successes. So, one solution leads to some more challenges in the future. All these challenges cannot be tackled only by managing them. This is where leadership comes in. Cultural changes and changes in the moral ideals can only be brought about by a very committed leader(s). The solutions to today’s problems with far reaching impact can only be solved by well-meaning directed action and guidance. Transformational leadership takes on the root causes of the problem and does not get limited by the symptoms only. Once identified, the long hard journey starts for a complete solution to the challenges facing us – especially changing the moral ideals and cultural habits that are pulling us back and preventing us from attaining the growth stage. Here the leader has to try very hard to involve and engage everybody and not allow anybody to be a mere spectator. The horizon of significance is the same for everybody in the culture and in the society. It is only when we ensure growth for all will the culture attain the good life phase. This is equality where everybody is not equal, but everybody gets the opportunity to attain growth and lead the good life. Each according to his capability (and efforts) is the motto. It is important that in a given culture or society, everybody is above the threshold level and then some may always be guided and directed to attain higher levels. The creation of an egalitarian society where everybody enjoys equal opportunities is a sure-fire way of ensuring the good life of growth. The shared horizon of significance should consciously avoid the instrumentalist corporatist culture taking roots today in our culture and society. This is the essence of a vibrant modern normative democracy where everything is established through discussions.