Ut med leadership, in med communityship

Passligt på min 50-årsdag kom kanadensiska Theglobeandmail.com ut med en intervju med Henry Mintzberg som inger hopp för de kommande 50 åren. Mintzberg, som är professor i management sticker hål på myten om betydelsen av leadership (ledarskap) av amerikanskt snitt för att åstadkomma saker i organisationer:

Everything is leadership, leadership, leadership. It is not coincidental that the more fuss that Americans make about leadership, the worse their leadership is whether it is corporate or political or anything else. Their leadership is dreadful in recent years and with all of this fuss on leadership…

…Even if leadership is designed to encourage and to bring along other people and engage other people, it is still the individual driving it. So, show me a leader and I will show you all kinds of followers and that is not the kind of organizations that we want. That is not the way that we build things up. I think that we need to put more emphasis on what I prefer to call, there is no word for it but I use the word ‘community-ship’, which is the idea that corporations and other organizations, when they function well, are communities. People care for each other, they worry about each other, they work for each other and they work for the institution and they feel pride in the institution.

Well said.